The EU-Commission has published a recent study conducted by Cambridge Econometrics, Ernst & Young and SQ Consult.
From the Executive Summary
This report sets out the potential positive and negative impacts of improvements to energy efficiency in Europe. The analysis presented in this report covers the macroeconomic, social and environmental impacts that could come about through increasing the EU’s 2030 target for energy efficiency beyond a level of 27% in comparison to baseline projections, to 30% or beyond. Parts of this report (notably the literature review included in Appendix D) build also on the work carried out for a previous study for the European Commission1, which focused on the economic, environmental and social impacts of improved energy efficiency in buildings. This is referred to in the text as ‘the EPBD report’.
Successive studies have shown that energy efficiency offers many of the most cost- effective options for meeting global greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. In many cases, energy efficiency measures have been shown to be ‘negative cost’, meaning that it would be economically advantageous to implement them. In this analysis, a wide range of potential effects is considered, covering the three pillars of economic, social and environmental sustainability.
In this report, four different scenarios are assessed, based upon the policy options set out in the EED Impact Assessment (EC, 2016). The timeframe for the analysis is 2030. Some of the results of the work undertaken have been included already in the EED Impact Assessment. This report offers a more detailed explanation of the methodology used and additional results from scenarios produced by the E3ME model which are not fully comparable to the results of scenarios presented in the EED Impact Assessment.
The inputs for each scenario have been derived from PRIMES model results, providing consistency with the full Impact Assessment. Six impact areas have been covered:
– Economy and labour market
– Health
– The environment
– Social cohesion
– Public budgets
– Industrial competitiveness
