It is critical that energy efficiency is a core point of the EU’s Energy Union, an ambitious effort spearheaded by Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic, aiming to further integrate Europe’s energy infrastructure, harmonise regulations and create supranational EU authority in some areas.
“The Energy Union as articulated in the Commission document brings together a number of very important and worthwhile objectives,” Opower Vice-President for Regulatory Affairs Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Simon Hill told New Europe in a phone interview on May 14. However, he added that while “the goals and objectives within the union are laudable and positive, the actual details of how the Union and how the Commission plan to get us to that point are at the moment unclear”.
Hill noted that a number of pieces of legislation and directives that are going to be coming both this year and next year which may very well take it on that route “but the reality is that the devil will be in the details and until we see that pieces of directives and legislation and other points it’s unclear how we get there”.
“In terms of Opower and how we can help with this revolves around an untapped resource – and that’s the people of the EU. And clearly there is an awful lot of work being done in energy efficiency both in the commercial and the industrial sector and within the residential sector,” Hill said, adding that experts from Opower, which provides cloud-based software to the utility industry, believe it is important to get people to change their behaviour in order to save energy.
“When we are talking about changing behavior, we make a stark difference between behavioural change and lifestyle change. A very basic example – a lifestyle change is maybe in cold climate you would turn down heating and put on a sweater or jumper. That’s not what we’re expecting. Behavioural change is if you’re not in a room, then there’s no point in putting heat and the lights in that room on. What we are proposing is behavioural energy efficiency. Getting people to change their behaviour to become more energy efficient not changing their lifestyle per se,” Hill said.
The Opower EMEA Vice President also noted that actual levels of savings derived from behavioural energy efficiency are very large. “Now in terms of each household across Europe typically we would be talking between 2%-3% in terms of savings,” Hill said.
“That may not sound a lot and indeed when you compare the percentage levels that we might get through a behavioural programme of 2%-3%, relative to the efficiency driven through energy-efficient devices like fridges or lighting or heating or glazing, you’re absolutely right. But the crucial difference with the behavioural programme is that it hits every single member of a population,” Hill said. “And while 2-3% may not sound like a lot when you extrapolate that number across an entire population that’s an enormous amount of energy.
Indeed relative to all other energy efficiency schemes, it is one of the largest savings you can get in terms of energy and one of the most cost-effective because behavioural energy efficiency is a very cheap form of energy efficiency,” Hill said, adding that behavioural tends to have an uplifting on all other forms of energy efficiency.
He expressed the hope that in the 2015 Energy Directive behavioural efficiency carries a far more weighted element in the directive.
Turning to EU Member States, Hill said that behavioural energy efficiency momentum is building across Europe. Denmark, Ireland and Italy have all approved behavioural programmes as an accredited energy efficiency approach in their national implementation of the Energy Efficiency Directive, he said. “Coming year I would anticipate to see a number of other member states also include behavioural within the list of eligible measures by which utilities within these member states can meet their energy efficiency obligations,” he said.
Hill noted that some member states are better at driving energy efficiency than others. “But I think there is a role for the European Commission and the European Union generally to drive energy efficiency and behavioural at the cornerstone of that and equally there is a role for member states to embrace innovation, embrace technology and show that they’re taking advantage of all the forms of energy efficiency we can get,” he said.
Hill also noted that energy efficiency has to be one of the cornerstones of energy security and supply. “The more energy efficiency we can drive, the more energy security we can get,” he said.
Moreover, there is a role for governments of EU Member States to ensure that they use all the tools available to them to drive as much energy efficiency as they can. “In terms of consumers, clearly they are one of the key tools you can use to drive energy efficiency,” Hill said. “But only do you drive energy efficiency from behavioural programmes, you also tend to improve the relationship between a customer and their energy supplier,” he said. “There is an upside not just for governments, there is an upside not just for consumers and customers, citizens but there is also an upside for the energy companies as well.”
http://www.neurope.eu/article/opower-eu-citizens-at-the-core-of-behavioural-energy-efficiency/