With the European Parliament due to approve the agreement reached on 11 July on the Energy Efficiency Directive (see EUROPE 13139/11), which sets the EU’s overall target for 2030, Verena Bax, an energy savings policy expert at CAN Europe, calls on the EU to speed up its efforts in this area, in a blog post published on 6 July.
And with good reason: according to the European NGO coalition, a target of at least 20% by 2030 is necessary to keep Europe on track with the Paris Agreement, which is 8.3 points higher than the target set by the directive.
Based on the latest provisional data from the European Environment Agency (EEA), Ms Bax states that while energy consumption fell sharply in 2020 and the EU was able to fulfil its promises, a year later the economic recovery and the lifting of restrictions brought “Europe back to square one”.
According to CAN Europe and the EEA, Member States must therefore do “seven times as much for the period 2021-2030”. In light of this, Verena Bax is urging Member States to go beyond the minimum requirements and boost energy savings in their National Energy and Climate Plans (NECP).
Referring to the Commission, Verena Bax argues that the sum of the national contributions to the indicative energy efficiency target for 2030 does not add up to the minimum requirement: there would be a collective gap of 2.8% for total energy demand and 3.1% for final total energy consumption.
Member States are therefore required to include in their NECPs a national contribution to energy efficiency in 2030, for both primary and final energy consumption, in line with the Paris Agreement. CAN Europe also recommends defining and describing “policies, measures and programmes”.
As a reminder, on 30 June, which was the deadline for updating the NECPs, only three Member States had done this on schedule (see EUROPE 13213/10).
Read the article: https://aeur.eu/f/7yb (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)