Showdown looms on energy efficiency

Member states’ intransigence could sink the energy-efficiency directive.

European Union member states are likely to run into tough criticism from the European Parliament after they agreed an unambitious position on energy efficiency yesterday (3 April). The mandate that the Council has adopted for negotiations with MEPs on the draft energy-efficiency directive would ease the obligations envisaged by the European Commission.

The Commission has proposed a 1.5% annual energy savings requirement. Member states have retained the target, but made it easier to meet, by allowing generation and distribution to be included, and retroactively permitting savings measures to be taken into account from as far back as 2008.

The directive is meant to combine and replace the energy-services directive and the combined heat and power directive, to help the EU honour its commitment of saving 368 million tonnes of oil equivalent per year by 2020.

Claude Turmes, a Green Luxembourgeois MEP who is leading negotiations in the Parliament, said the Council’s mandate was not acceptable, and showed that “governments are just contradicting themselves” by taking positions that conflict with the 2020 target that they have already agreed.

Members of the Parliament’s industry committee agreed on a strengthening of the Commission’s proposal in January, explicitly excluding any early action or generation and distribution from calculations of savings.

Lack of improvement

The Coalition for Energy Savings, a campaigning group, said the Council’s position was no improvement on current legislation, and could “even be a weakening of what is already done”. It estimates that the Parliament’s version would get the EU to its 2020 target, while the Commission’s proposal would get it only two-thirds of the way there – and the Council’s position would condemn the EU to reaching no more than one-third of the target by 2020.

The Danish presidency is believed to be concerned that such a weak member-state position would not win MEPs’ support, jeopardising the early agreement on the new measure that Denmark had placed at the centre of its environmental priorities. Talks are due to begin on 11 April. The Council’s mandate is understood to be open to further discussion. But the risk exists that the Commission might just scrap the proposal on the grounds that a measure so diluted could be pointless or even detrimental.

Talk of withdrawal makes the energy industry nervous. One industry source told European Voice this makes for uncertainty, “at a time when investment certainty is badly needed for the next eight years”.

BEUC, the European consumers’ organisation, is also apprehensive about a dispute between the Parliament and member states on energy targets. This could “weaken crucial measures aimed at helping consumers curb their energy consumption,” it said.