Comments Off on ENSMOV Plus shares experience to meet the challenge of higher energy savings targets
AMSTERDAM — Energy savings and efficiency have become central topics in the last years, having faced multiple crises. This has made many reconsider how they consume energy individually and globally. In European Green Deal, the EU is clearly increasing its climate ambition and aims at becoming the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.
Article 7 of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) is a key element of the European Union’s Fit for 55 Package. To meet the EU’s 55% net emissions reduction target and address energy poverty, national energy efficiency policy measures will be essential complements to EU law, such as eco-design and carbon pricing regulations.
With the EED recast, Article 7 will soon become Article 8, and will keep requiring Member States to achieve final energy savings. The changes brought by the EED recast are under final negotiations. What is clear already is that, likely from 2024 on, the rate of energy savings required will significantly increase, a share of these savings will need to be delivered amongst energy poor households (or other priority groups), and savings from new fossil fuel technologies would be excluded.
This means that Member States will need to ramp up the ambition of their policy measures, target specific end-users and shift the focus of technology support towards low-carbon options. These ambitious changes are entirely consistent with the 55% target, the EU Green Deal and the Renovation Wave, but they are also challenging. To meet these challenges, they can build on successes of the first Art. 7 EED obligation period (2014-2020) and continue to improve evaluation, measurement and verification (EM&V) practices to provide confidence in the impacts of policy measures.
This is why the ENSMOV Plus project will therefore play a central role by helping Member States to better navigate policy development, implementation and evaluation, and to learn from each other. This will be done through experience-sharing activities and resources tailored to the achievement of Article 7 EED objectives. Launched in December 2022, ENSMOV Plus is a three-year European project of the LIFE programme and builds on the previous ENSMOV project with a strong consortium that includes national energy agencies, national associations of stakeholders and research institutes from 12 Member States: Austria, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Slovenia.
“Based on the Commission’s report on the achievement of the 2020 energy efficiency targets, 21 Member States achieved their headline target in terms of final energy consumption not to exceed in 2020. And the EU headline energy efficiency target for 2020 was achieved. But this was partly due to COVID and the resulting lower energy demand,” says Jean-Sébastien Broc, coordinator of ENSMOV Plus at IEECP.
“The picture is even more mixed when looking at the Article 7 target about cumulative energy savings over 2014-2020: 14 Member States met their energy savings, with seven of them overachieving their target by more than 20% (and even sometimes by more than 50%). Whereas ten other Member States did not meet their energy savings obligation, with five of them missing their target by 25% or more. The over-achievements show that doing more is feasible, whereas the under-achievements remind us that not all policies have been successful. Every country and stakeholder can learn from what happened in other countries, provided that experience is analysed and discussed. This is what ENSMOV and now ENSMOV Plus are doing. In addition to make state-of-the-art knowledge easy to find and acquire, the project provides a unique forum for public bodies and private stakeholders from all EU27 countries to exchange.”
National authorities and market stakeholders have welcomed the opportunity to share experiences, and discuss challenges and solutions related to energy efficiency obligation schemes (EEOSs) and alternative measures. The previous ENSMOV project organised more than 100 events (EU & regional workshops, webinars and national meetings), gathering a total of more than 1,500 unique participants.
ENSMOV Plus will provide solutions to facilitate and expand sharing of knowledge and experience amongst Member States for the implementation of policies under Art.7 EED, and will further develop the already existing knowledge transfer platform.
Comments Off on Clean heat standards: New tools for the fossil fuel phaseout in Europe
Europe is heavily reliant on fossil fuels in the heating sector. The EU has set itself a goal of deploying 30 million additional heat pumps by 2030. To advance the transition away from fossil fuels in the heating sector, the EU and its Member States have recently proposed or agreed on several heat-related policies. This includes an emissions trading scheme for greenhouse gases from heating and transport. The European Commission also announced that it will propose a revision of ecodesign rules for heating appliances, meaning a de facto ban on the sale of standalone fossil fuel boilers by 2029. Despite these positive actions, additional policy measures are needed to achieve rapid, effective and fair decarbonisation of heating.
This paper explores how novel policy tools called ‘clean heat standards’ could reinforce the EU framework for heat decarbonisation. Clean heat standards place a quantitative target on market actors, such as energy network companies, energy suppliers and manufacturers of heating equipment, to decarbonise heating and provide some flexibility in how to achieve it. This definition captures different tools, including some already discussed or in use in France, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States. These tools can complement other clean transition policies, for instance appliance standards and bans can directly rule out certain technologies from the market, while clean heat standards could provide a positive target for market actors to meet.
Clean heat standards, coupled with complementary policies, can help accelerate the transition away from fossil fuel heating. RAP offers recommendations to help decision-makers make the most of these tools.
Comments Off on Staying the course: Keeping the key role of the energy savings obligation in focus as negotiations reach their endgame
As we move towards the endgame in the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) revision, what should negotiators be considering as they recraft the key energy saving provisions — the energy savings obligation?
The right level of ambition …
As part of their response strategy to the energy crisis, EU legislators have committed to finalise the revision of the EED, the main legislation to deliver energy savings. Legislators are planning to meet on 2 March to advance this discussion. Last year, the Commission proposed a 13% energy efficiency target for 2030 and urged legislators to align the energy savings obligation (Article 8) with the REPowerEU goals.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the consequent disruption in fossil fuel supplies and the resultant increase in energy prices make action on energy efficiency more urgent than ever. The Council’s position is to gradually increase ambition over time, when what is needed is a ramp up in ambition now.
As political deadlines to resolve negotiations loom, it is important that last minute, seemingly innocuous changes do not undermine the good work put in over the preceding months.
This is particularly problematic with provisions such as Article 8, with its highly technical measurement processes set out in Annex V of the directive. The one non-negotiable technicality is the principle of additionality to EU law. Without this principle, the energy savings obligation will not play its role in meeting the Fit for 55 and REPowerEU targets, endangering their achievement. For example, energy savings from EU product and equipment standards require minimum energy performance levels that cannot be counted towards Member States obligations.
As political deadlines to resolve negotiations loom, it is important that last minute, seemingly innocuous changes do not undermine the good work put in over the preceding months.
The introduction of a new EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) does not significantly impact the delivery of energy efficiency policy measures under Article 8. During the most recent obligation period (2014-2020), countries reported numerous policy measures that saved energy covered by the current EU ETS — amongst both energy intensive industries and electricity consumers. The ETS meant that subsidy rates might have been a little lower than otherwise needed.
The extension of emissions trading to other energy sources used in buildings, transport and industry, will not significantly shrink the amount of savings that Member States can achieve through their national energy efficiency schemes. Indeed, Article 8 is the perfect complement to ETS 2. Emissions trading internalises the external costs of carbon, while Article 8 tackles the other market failures and barriers affecting energy efficiency take-up.
Removing indefensible fossil fuel subsidies
In its Net Zero by 2050 strategy, the International Energy Agency said that there should be no new fossil fuel boiler sales after 2025. The EED proposal moves in this direction by excluding energy savings from fossil fuel combustion technologies in its proposal. This makes a lot of sense, especially in the buildings sector, where the continued subsiding of fossil fuel boilers creates stranded assets that will need to be removed before the end of their lifetimes as carbon emissions becomes scarcer in the 2030s.
For Member States wishing to fulfil their energy savings obligations through buildings sector policy measures, the fossil fuel exclusion makes very little difference. The most efficient fossil fuel boilers are only slightly more efficient than the minimum standard boilers required through EU Ecodesign regulations. Policy measures that persuade consumers to switch to electrically powered heat pumps deliver around 15 times the energy savings than even the most efficient boilers, making electrification policies a no-brainer from an energy efficiency standpoint.
Delivering a more equitable energy transition
The one area where the negotiators’ positions appear to converge is on the benefits of targeting energy efficiency actions amongst vulnerable groups. The Commission’s proposal requires a minimum proportion of energy savings to be made amongst energy poor, vulnerable or households living in social housing. This aligns well with the social objectives of the Fit for 55 Package, including the use of ETS 2 revenues through the Social Climate Fund.
All these issues must be considered as negotiators move towards finalising the legal text in March. Energy efficiency policies lie at the heart of a cost-effective and equitable Fit for 55 Package. An ambitious energy savings obligation is the way to ensure this happens.
Comments Off on ‘Hydrogen-ready’ boilers – a lifeline for fossil fuel heating in Europe
The heating industry is in turmoil. The need to decarbonise energy demand as well as the gas crisis caused by the war in Ukraine have led to governments around Europe setting phase-out dates for the installation of fossil fuel heating systems — something also being considered by EU legislators.
Despite the urgent need to decarbonise and remove fossil fuels, there is a concerning pushback that attempts to preserve the status quo.
Enter ‘hydrogen-ready’ or ‘renewable fuel-ready’ boilers; the fossil fuel heating industry’s latest attempt to slow down clean heating.
During negotiations of the EU’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) some members of the European Parliament proposed that “boilers certified to run on renewable fuels … shall not be considered fossil heating systems”.
‘Renewable fuels’ could include hydrogen or biomass-based fuels, such as biogas and bio-oil – both seen to have only a very limited growth potential.
Rather than require all new buildings to be fitted with clean heating systems, such as heat pumps, or be connected to district heating, the proposal would allow the installation of fossil fuel heating systems as long as they could, in theory, one day also run on renewable fuels.
The problem is that a hydrogen-ready boiler is a fossil fuel boiler as long as there is no green hydrogen to supply it. Currently only 0.04% of global hydrogen production is green hydrogen.
We have seen such approaches before: when the coal industry came under pressure to reduce emissions it promised ‘clean coal’ using carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Significant policy support was subsequently offered, and clean coal attracted a lot of attention from policymakers and the media. The idea was to build CCS-ready coal plants.
However, after years of pilot projects and substantial public investment in coal power plants with CCS, only a single commercially operating facility remains – one 115 megawatt unit of the Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan, Canada.
The European Union spent €587 million to support the development of clean coal and has little to show for it. If we can learn anything from the history of clean coal, then it is this: great expectations and promises by incumbent industries do not guarantee good outcomes.
Green hydrogen from renewable electricity – the only zero-carbon form of hydrogen – will already stretch production for use in sectors where less costly alternatives are unavailable.
We also know that concerns over resource availability and sustainability limit the growth potential of any biomass-based heat sources. This is indeed recognised within the commission’s own impact assessments behind the Fitfor55 package.
The idea that we will have abundant green hydrogen or clean bioenergy supplies sufficient to replace fossil fuels for heating is fanciful. Yet off-the-shelf heat pumps and district heating can reduce primary energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions immediately and cost-effectively.
The International Energy Agency has said that after 2025, we should stop installing fossil fuel boilers. There is no guarantee, indeed it seems quite unlikely, that hydrogen will ever flow through gas distribution networks and biogas and bio-oil will always be limited.
Therefore, most fossil fuel heating systems installed are likely to always run on fossil fuels. Proven technologies, such as heat pumps and clean district heating, immediately reduce carbon emissions, and with the grid and heating supplies getting cleaner every year, those emission reductions will only increase going forward.
The EPBD could be the solution
We’re still in the middle of an energy crisis primarily linked to gas prices. With so much gas used for heating, the EU has the chance to course-correct this obviously problematic issue with the current EPBD.
Providing the energy industry and member states with clarity and direction on heating is vital to ensure investment is driven into the rapid deployment of actual clean heating technologies. The proposed greenwashing of fossil fuel boilers risks undermining progress in the buildings sector where rapid progress is needed.
The original version of this article appeared in Euractiv.
Comments Off on Standards for EV smart charging: A guide for local authorities
The electrification of road transport is happening – and it is already having a profound impact on the energy system and our cities. As more and more people drive electric, smart charging can ease the integration of the newcomers into the grid.
Smart charging enables charging to automatically happen at times when electricity costs are lowest – without compromising the needs of vehicle owners. As a result, smart charging creates a powerful opportunity to use more renewable energy and better utilise existing grids, accelerating the energy transition while reducing costs for all.
Cities are essential actors in making smart charging happen at a large scale. Every time they publish a public procurement procedure and every time they issue permits for EV infrastructure, it is in their hands to make smart charging work better — now and in the years to come.
But how can local authorities deploy a future-proof, robust smart charging network, with technology rapidly evolving?
Important standards supporting smart charging – such as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) – are not yet available for charging stations built today. To avoid becoming obsolete before the end of its expected lifetime, infrastructure must be ready for future upgrades.
Authors Luka De Bruyckere of ECOS and Jaap Burger from RAP offer a guide for local authorities to help ensure that cities can take these standardisation developments into account when procuring charging infrastructure.
Comments Off on Pump up the volume: Heat pumps for a decarbonised future
If the video is not visible, please accept all cookies to enable the player.
The most powerful tool for rapidly decarbonising heating in buildings and homes is the humble heat pump. How powerful? The International Energy Agency’s recently released analysis estimates that potential global carbon dioxide emissions reductions from heat pumps can reach at least 500 million tonnes in 2030. This would be akin to eliminating the annual CO2 emissions from all of the cars in Europe today.
Evidence from the IEA underscores the ‘why’ of switching to heat pumps while the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), CLASP and the Global Buildings Performance Network offer further insights on the ‘how.’ The three organisations collaborated to create a toolkit to help policymakers develop packages to drive the heat pump market and deployment of the technology at scale.
On 15 December 2022, the Electrification Academy welcomed the lead author of the IEA report, Yannick Monschauer, and two of the heat pump toolkit authors, Richard Lowes of RAP and Matt Malinowski from CLASP. They shared:
Highlights and conclusions of the IEA study The future of heat pumps, including examination of barriers and solutions for heat pump deployment.
Comments Off on Taking the burn out of heating for low-income households
The future of heat in buildings is not fossil fuelled. The urgency of the climate crisis, Europe’s 2030 climate targets, the current war in Ukraine and the resulting skyrocketing energy prices all mean we need to massively accelerate efforts to move away from burning fossil fuels in our homes. This is no small task as fossil fuels currently account for over 75% of heat supply, and the residential sector is Europe’s single biggest fossil gas user, responsible for 40% of gas consumption.
The recent energy price volatility and the cripplingly high gas prices make the economics of switching from fossil fuel heating to heating with a heat pump better in 2022 than before the crisis. Those households that can afford it may well be considering the switch.
For lower-income households, however, the high prices make all forms of heating – and most other household expenses – less affordable. For these people, the switch to clean heating is further away than ever. But the risks of remaining locked into expensive fossil fuel use are more acute due to high and volatile prices, rising costs of redundant infrastructure and, potentially, exorbitant costs for hydrogen.
RAP analysis establishes the upfront investment and running costs to switch to heating with a heat pump, before and after the price crisis. Based on this assessment, Louise Sunderland and Duncan Gibb set out strategies to make the switch to clean heating affordable and safe for lower-income households. Targeted subsidies for upfront investment in clean heating technologies are essential, alongside reforms to electricity pricing to help ensure bills are affordable. The study also explores a range of other strategies to secure affordable clean heat such as bringing together combinations of building-level technologies, services and the benefits of cheap renewable electricity generation. We present five recommendations for:
Prioritising lower-income households in heat decarbonisation strategies.
Ensuring an ‘energy efficiency first’ approach to reduce heating needs.
Providing targeted subsidies for clean technologies.
Rebalancing burdens away from electricity bills and directing social support to electricity bills.
Focussing Europe’s innovation attention on the needs of lower-income households.
Comments Off on Hybrid Heat: the Cool Path to Home Heating
The opportunity: If the over 50 million US homes that have central air conditioning and a separate heating system just replaced their AC with a look-alike and more efficient “two-way” heat pump unit, those households could not only cool over the summer, but they could also heat during the spring and fall. This would produce the immediate benefit of cutting a home’s fossil-fuel bill and its carbon emissions.
On a practical level, how easy is it to replace a failed central AC unit with a heat pump?
“Make the Swap” assembled a panel of speakers to provide manufacturer, installer, and policy perspectives. Camille Kadoch from RAP moderated a discussion with Matt Malinowski of CLASP; Weston Berg of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE); Nick Harbeck of Johnson Controls; and Nate Adams of HVAC 2.0.
What follows are excerpts from their discussion.
The Premise
Matt Malinowski, who spent over a decade supporting the federal Energy Star efficiency programs and is now CLASP’s director of climate research, framed the discussion with a short presentation that builds on CLASP and RAP’s recent study, Combating High Fuel Prices with Hybrid Heating: The Case for Swapping Air Conditioners for Heat Pumps. In a nutshell: Today, the homes that cool during the summer with central AC, heat during the cooler months with a separate furnace or boiler. When that AC unit dies, if it’s replaced with a heat pump, then that efficient appliance could not only cool the home more efficiently in the summer months, but it could also heat the home in the fall and spring, displacing less-efficient fossil or electric resistance heating.
“It’s a little sneaky,” admitted Malinowski when questioned by Kadoch. “Getting at heating load through cooling allows people to keep their current heating systems and does not require a full change out.”
Why Is This Hybrid Approach Possible?
According to Malinowski, Americans buy 4 million heat pumps and 4 million gas furnaces each year. But they also buy 6 million central AC units each year. If, over ten years, those AC units were replaced with heat pumps, then more than half the US housing stock would have installed heat pumps, independent of any other efforts to swap out furnaces and boilers.
Kadoch noted, “So, this approach is about ‘displacing’ and not ‘replacing.’ ”
“Yes, our modeling for the lower 48 states and Washington DC, found that under very conservative assumptions — the ‘changeover,’ where the heat pump hands back home heating to the furnace at 40 degrees Fahrenheit — we could eliminate 39% of fossil fuel heating.” Furthermore, he explained, “under those assumptions, household utility bills and CO2 emissions would drop by 11%, and emissions reductions would grow to about 50 million tons of CO2 annually by 2032.”
As Matt’s summary made clear, there are many advantages to this approach. They include reduced consumer costs, increased choice, a cold climate backup with the existing furnace (but avoided fossil-fuel emissions when that furnace doesn’t need to be used) and ease of installation: heat pumps can be “dropped in” to replace central AC.
How Can Heat Pumps Just Be ‘Dropped In’?
Kadoch then turned the conversation to Nate Adams, the “House Whisperer” who has been electrifying homes since 2014 and is CEO of HVAC 2.0, a nascent network for HVAC contractors that lean towards electrification.
Kadoch: “Nate, so, what does it look like when you replace a failed central AC unit with a heat pump? Are we ready for this?”
Adams: “The answer is there’s not a big difference. The way that I compare a heat pump and an air conditioner, it’s like two identical cars, but one [the heat pump] has a reverse gear and the other doesn’t.”
“Are we ready, largely, yes. It doesn’t take much more time to install — 20 or 30 minutes. Fundamentally, it’s the same piece of equipment; all the connections are the same.”
Kadoch: “Is it going to be challenge finding someone to do this installation?”
Adams: “One of the reasons this hybrid approach came up in the first place — it lets everyone keep their existing heating system — their safety blanket. You can do this in any home with central AC with little pushback from contractors.”
“But the critical thing that needs to happen — because the vast majority of installs are done on an emergency basis when the AC fails on a hot day — is that a heat pump needs to be available in the contractor’s supply house. Otherwise another air conditioner will get installed. A contractor puts in what’s on the shelf.”
“The wholesale cost difference, what the contractor pays off the shelf at the supply house, runs generally between $300 and $600 difference for the same type of unit.”
Getting Heat Pumps on the Shelf
Kadoch then questioned Nick Harbeck, manager of regulatory and environmental affairs at Johnson Controls, a company manufacturing residential and commercial heat pumps in Wichita, Kansas and Norman, Oklahoma.
Kadoch: “Nate, given that there are more ACs sold today than heat pumps, are manufacturers now targeting the AC market with heat pumps?”
Harbeck: “Yes. We view this as an enormous opportunity both from a market perspective and with respect to CO2 reductions.”
“It is also important to recognize that there are programs out there to incentivize the installation of heat pumps. So, in addition to the low cost of switching from an AC to a heat pump, there is the Inflation Reduction Act, for example. Section 25C provides homeowners with a tax credit for investments in certain high-efficiency appliances, and the HOMES program is a rebate program for housing energy retrofits. Both provide strong encouragement to install heat pumps. Those incentives are very rich and can be expected to move the needle toward the more advantageous equipment to install.”
The Policy Environment
Kadoch also explored the policy landscape for heat pumps with Weston Berg, a senior researcher with ACEEE who provides research and technical assistance related to utility regulations, and is one of the authors of ACEEE’s State Energy Efficiency Scorecard since 2016.
“We are seeing the greatest amount of activity from states that have recently passed clean energy legislation and want to secure carbon reductions from the power sector,” Berg said. “California and Massachusetts get mentioned a lot, but just in the past year we’ve seen activity in the Midwest — Minnesota’s Eco Act, Illinois’ Climate Equitable Jobs Act, and energy legislation and other policies coming out of Colorado.”
“Perhaps the biggest barrier that we see is that utility energy efficiency programs are not inclined to support fuel switching from fossil fuel heating to electric. In some places it is actually prohibited.”
“That said, we are seeing states do the work and try to reform those types of policies,” Berg added, highlighting states such as Maine and New York that are setting particular targets for heat pump adoption, as well as others that are retooling their efficiency targets to emphasize total fuel savings or avoided emissions.
“The second point is that states are changing energy efficiency rules to make clear that programs can fund electrification as a form of energy efficiency, when it saves total energy and avoids GHGs,” Berg said. “Giving a green light for funding, of course, provides some certainty and enables utilities to go after those savings in a deliberate way.”
This hybrid approach is available today for more than 50 million US homes. Doing it sounds pretty easy, too. Perhaps most important, this is urgent, as the authors of Combating High Fuel Prices with Hybrid Heating emphasized:
Every six seconds a new residential furnace or air conditioner starts up in the United States, and that decarbonization opportunity is lost until 2035-2040.
Comments Off on Options for the better integration of demand-side resources
Options for the better integration of demand-side resources was written by Zsuzsanna Pató for the Directorate-General for Energy, European Commission. It covers options to further mobilise energy efficiency and demand-side flexibility in European power markets. These options are clustered into:
Short-term actions: No need for legislative change, but will help energy efficiency and demand-side flexibility this winter and could be promoted as best practices.
Limited edits or potential placeholders for further revisions that could be agreed on during the upcoming revision of the Electricity Directive and the Electricity Regulation, and potentially the ongoing finalisation of the Energy Efficiency Directive and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive.
New ideas within the remit of these legislation pieces that could be introduced in the next round of revisions
This report is reprinted here with permission.
Stay informed
Sign up to get the latest information about RAP’s publications, webinars, and news.
