The first meeting of the Dialogue Groups on Energy efficiency measures to alleviate energy poverty was held on Tuesday 14 June 2022.

You can find attached to this post the agenda, presentation files and minutes.

The meeting presented the scope and the approach to develop the calculation methodology for this new Priority Action. Then guest presentations shared experience from Italy about quantitative measurements related to energy poverty (Anna Realini, RSE - Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico) and from UK about modelling real world energy savings (Avishek Banerjee, BEIS – UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy).

Key points highlighted in the discussions:

(about Accelerated replacement of inefficient electric motors)

– There is a growing interest in energy efficiency measures to alleviate energy poverty and the related energy savings calculations (cf. new provisions in the proposed EED recast and current energy crisis).

– Current energy savings calculations for Article 7 EED are rarely differentiated according to the type of households or dwellings, whereas significant differences might be found in energy consumption, and thereby in energy savings, of energy poor households compared to other households.

– Likewise, studies have shown significant differences between theoretical energy consumption (as estimated by building energy models) and actual energy consumption (based on measurements or metering).

– Differences between theoretical and actual energy savings can also be due to performance gaps (lower performance of the measure installed compared to the expectation, for example due to defaults in the installation).

– A common approach to address these issues is to include correction factors in the calculation formula (e.g., prebound effect, rebound effect / comfort taking factor, performance gap / measure correction factor).

– The literature provides indicative values of such factors for space heating (but with variability from one study to the other). There is less evidence available for other end-uses (e.g. electrical appliances).

– While rarely implemented yet, another complementary approach would be to consider indicative values for key parameters (e.g., space heating demand, heating system efficiency) that would be differentiated by energy band of dwellings and/or by type of households.