Clear Winners

Energy plan promises 20% cut in wastage EU-wide

The EU’s energy efficiency plan is out. And it’s ‘not rocket science’: if ever a plan merited that tired epithet, this one does. Its 70-plus initiatives for the next six years, and ten priority actions, all seem to cry out: “Why aren’t we doing this already?” Yet even these no-brainer baseline measures would cut energy consumption by 2020 to just 80% of what it would otherwise have been, the EU Commission says.

The plan’s actions divide into six areas - infrastructure, buildings, appliances, processes, transport and energy systems. It promises, among other things:

• to put forward next year, “if necessary”, legislative proposals to make sure the motor industry meets its target to cut average new vehicle emissions to 120g of CO2 per km by 2012;
• to develop higher product performance requirements in 2008 for a wider range of electrical appliances;
• to upgrade its existing energy performance directive in 2009, with the introduction of EU-wide minimum standards for new and renovated buildings; and
• to look at ways of making its energy tax regime more coherent and better targeted. One idea is that producing - and buying - energy-efficient goods could attract tax credits.

Not surprisingly, the white goods trade association likes this last idea. And the insulation producers’ lobby gave the whole plan the thumbs up.

Energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs, who keeps saying that energy efficiency is his top priority, has been holding out for a specific plan of this kind, rather than rolling everything into the general energy policy that’s supposed to come out in January. His proposals are bound to meet some resistance, as ever with the EU, from national governments saying they should be left to sort out some of these things themselves. Perhaps if they’d done that already…

As luck would have it, coinciding with Piebalgs’s plan, UK environment secretary David Miliband was talking up the need for the EU to raise its game on combating climate change. Meeting his German counterpart in Berlin, he said it should be “an environmental union… whose raison d’être in the 21st century must be to prevent the exploitation of the planet” by pushing for much tougher internal and global action.

9 November 2006