Abstract
Monitoring the progress of the European Union and its Member States towards the EU’s energy efficiency target is a crucial part of the mandatory process as defined in the Energy Efficiency Directive 2012/27/EU. In this paper, we conduct index decomposition analyses to show the effects of both policies and autonomous developments driving the changes of primary energy consumption for the European Union (EU28) and its Member States for the time period of 2000 to 2014, with a comparative analysis of Germany and Poland. These analyses are based on the logarithmic mean Divisia index methodology and primarily on data compiled by Eurostat. They are carried out on two levels, i.e. on the level of total primary energy consumption as well as on the level of primary energy consumption related to electricity generation. The first level examines the influences of changes in final energy consumption and changes within the energy conversion sector on primary energy consumption. With the second level, we provide insights into the effects of changes in electricity consumption and production. According to our first-level analysis, the consumption of primary energy in the EU28 is primarily influenced by an increased share of electrical energy and the counteracting effect of rising efficiency in electricity generation, induced by an increasing share of renewable energies. Furthermore, the reduction of final energy consumption had a significant decreasing influence on primary energy consumption in the European Union. The second level of our analysis regarding electricity generation shows that the increasing effect on primary energy consumption due to the rising consumption of electricity was mainly compensated by substituting nuclear and thermal power plants by renewable energy technologies.
Highlights
As part of the so-called 20-20-20 targets (European Council 2009), the European Union has set itself the target to reduce energy consumption by 20% compared to a baseline
In the step (BResults^ section), we present the results for the EU28 as well as for two rather different EU Member States: first, for Germany which can be described as a state where the demand for energy consumption has reached a certain saturation level and where the transformation of the energy system towards long-term sustainability targets is strongly changing the composition of the conversion sector, as a consequence of the decision to phase out nuclear energy by 2020 and due to strong support for renewables, and second, for Poland, where further economic growth is expected and for which the conversion sector is characterised by large shares of fossil fuels, notably coal
On the EU28 level, our analysis shows an overall decline of primary energy consumption (PEC) by 110 Mtoe from 2000 to 2014.This decrease in PEC was mainly driven by increasing overall efficiency in electricity generation and reduction of final energy consumption
Summary
As part of the so-called 20-20-20 targets (European Council 2009), the European Union has set itself the target to reduce energy consumption by 20% compared to a baseline. The proposal for an amendment of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) sets a 30% binding energy efficiency target for 2030 at EU level (European Commission 2016b) These targets are not independent of each other: for example, the penetration of renewables in the power generation sector has impacts on primary energy consumption, on the fulfilment of the energy efficiency target. This is due to the following effect: While the physical energy efficiency of renewable energy technologies is below 100% (e.g. up to around 20% for multicrystalline photovoltaic cells and up to around 50% for wind energy), international energy balances as published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) apply the so-called physical energy content method (IEA 2016). They increase the total efficiency of the conversion sector and lower the primary energy consumption for a given electricity production
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