Andris Piebalgs: A good start for the French presidency

Shrinking European oil reserves could do little to increase production. From the offer side we are in the hands of our main oil suppliers. But we can do a lot on the demand side, and this is precisely what European Ministers are going to talk about today: energy efficiency. 

In other entries of this blog I have already stated that Energy Efficiency is my priority number one. The European Council has already endorsed the objective that the EU must cost-effectively save 20% of our energy use in 2020. At an oil price of $60, this meant a ?100bn fuel saving and a reduction of CO2 by 780 million tonnes. Obviously, the potential benefits of the EU succeeding in its energy efficiency objectives have only risen since then.  

Some concrete measures in the way to reach this target will be taken next Monday. The Regulatory Committee of the Eco-design directive will vote for first time. They are going to approve (or refuse) new efficiency standards for standby devices, this little red light that many of you have on your TVs, or music centres which allow the remote control to turn them on. The consumption of standby devices in Europe is equivalent to the whole electricity production of Hungary. I’m therefore confident that Member States’ Representatives in the Regulatory Committee will approve the standards proposed by the Commission, which could lead to substantial energy savings. In the coming months, we are going to present new standards for 20 groups of products, including street and office lighting equipment, external power supplies, boilers, water heaters, television and domestic lighting products, including the phasing out of incandescent light bulbs.  

When we succeed in adopting the measures for our first 20 groups of products by 2010, this will have a huge saving potential, exceeding the energy consumption of the Czech Republic, Denmark and
Portugal combined. The economic savings potential is equivalent to half of the total EU budget. 

New measures will come in the near future. The Commission plans to increase the scope of the Eco-design directive not only to energy-using products, but also to all sort of “energy-related” products, including, for instance windows, insulation materials, etc. At the end of the year, I will propose a more ambitious Energy Efficiency of Buildings Directive. The housing sector represents 40% of the European final energy consumption. When fully implemented in 2020, these changes alone will then save between 150-2000 million tonnes of CO2 per year, or 5-6% of our total EU CO2 emissions.  

Given the huge potential of energy efficiency makes perfect sense that the French Presidency start their energy discussions talking about energy efficiency. As I told you at the beginning I’m now in a high speed train going to Paris to discuss about that.  And I think that this is a fortunate coincidence. Not only because the train is a more efficient mode of travel compared with a private car for instance, but because as the International Energy Agency said, “we need to save oil in a hurry”.

Source