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Strategic homogenisation of energy efficiency measures: an approach to improve the efficiency and reduce the costs of the quantification of energy savings

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Abstract

With the ongoing efforts on the European level to promote energy efficiency, the need for the development of harmonised evaluation criteria for energy efficiency measures arises. Such criteria will allow extensive comparisons of the success or failure of the implementation of energy efficiency measures throughout Europe and will support the development of a first–best strategy for the realisation of energy savings targets in Europe. Two fundamental evaluation possibilities exist: bottom-up and top-down quantifications of energy savings. Bottom-up calculations give a more detailed view of the impact of energy efficiency measures but are much more costly and time consuming than top-down calculations. In our opinion, this effort can be reduced without losing precision in the savings calculations by the homogenisation of these energy efficiency measures. In this paper, we develop a framework specifying how such a homogenisation could look.

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Notes

  1. The lifetimes of energy efficiency measures for bottom-up quantifications are coded in CEN (2007) in a European context.

  2. See, e.g. Adensam et al. (2008). These methods also allow for the inclusion of data specific for the evaluated energy efficiency action. In this case, the benefit of providing energy savings with a relatively low effort is lost.

  3. The publication of this harmonised model was originally announced for 1 January 2008 by the European Commission. The authors expect the finalised paper for 2010.

  4. In 2004, the regional government of Upper Austria created the energy efficiency programme Energie Star 2010 (Dell 2004). The authors were assigned with the calculation of the energy savings achieved within this programme and have thereby experienced the limitations of the existing approaches. Whether our approach will be applied for further energy saving calculations for the Energie Star 2010 programme will be decided when it is known if its results will be credited for the ESD savings target or not.

  5. In 2007, the European Commission (DG TREN) confirmed to one of the authors that the deadline of January 1, 2008, would not be met and that the development of the harmonised bottom-up model would not be finished before 2010.

  6. The leaders of the EMEEES subgroups on top-down and bottom-up calculations were chosen to also be the leaders of the subgroups of the CEN TF 190 on these topics to have excellent transfer of information.

  7. For a description of the main principles of white certificate schemes, see Bertoldi and Rezessy (2008) and Oikonomou et al. (2007).

  8. Dates in brackets refer to the first year for which compliance was obligatory. The regulatory framework was specified earlier, respectively.

  9. See Labanca (2007).

  10. Theoretically, it is also a rebound effect if the saved money from the reduced heating costs is used to finance an additional (energy-intensive) vacation trip. In this case, the rebound effect is nearly unobservable.

  11. Vreuls et al. (2009) state that the costs for the determination of the adjustmentsnet can “easily reach 100,000 €”, whereas it is usually desired that evaluation costs do not exceed 3–5% (Dreessen and Langlois 2005) of the overall measure costs.

  12. The evaluation was part of a study for the Austrian representation of electric utilities (VEÖ) in preparation for possible voluntary agreements in consequence of the ESD. The project report is not public.

  13. There, the authors conclude that a stratified sample design is usually more appropriate than pure random sampling. One can usually find heterogeneous groups regarding their achieved savings—with highly different coefficients of variations. Simple random sampling is, therefore, not applicable without a significant loss in precision.

  14. This represents electricity savings of ~20% of an average annual electricity consumption of 4,000 kWh per household.

  15. It can be useful to have more than one reference measure, each with an associated HP.

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Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank five anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and input.

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Correspondence to Johannes Reichl.

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Johannes Reichl is research associate at the Energy Institute at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria) and member of the Task Force 190: Energy efficiency and saving calculations of the European Committee for Standardisation.

Funding of the project that led to this article was provided by the Klima- und Energiefonds (grant number: 815587) and the non-profit research association Energy Institute at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. The project was carried out within the programme “ENERGIE DER ZUKUNFT”.

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Reichl, J., Kollmann, A. Strategic homogenisation of energy efficiency measures: an approach to improve the efficiency and reduce the costs of the quantification of energy savings. Energy Efficiency 3, 189–201 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-009-9060-z

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