The European Green Deal sets out the ambition to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, in particular through a ‘renovation wave’. Energy Efficiency Services will play a key role in delivering this by offering turnkey packages of expertise, resources and financing to unlock opportunities that may otherwise remain untapped.
The QualitEE project has recently published a new European toolkit for quality assessment and procurement of Energy Efficiency Services to tackle these barriers.
It has been developed through an extensive stakeholder consultation process and testing, in 28 pilot projects over the last three years. They cover 11 European countries and represent 33 million Euros of investment, 33 GWh of annual primary energy savings, and over 9,200 tonnes of annual CO2 emissions savings.
Feedback from the consultation process revealed that – whilst there is a lot of commonality that can be harmonised across Europe – there are local nuances of Energy Efficiency Services markets. National adaptations of the quality assessment criteria (in regional languages) have therefore been developed in QualitEE partner countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
Discussions have been initiated to assess the business case for institutionalising these criteria into national quality assurance schemes. The outcomes have been published in business case reports, which outline a diverse range of possible approaches, going from the incorporation into national standards, to the incorporation in national ESCO registries.
Read the full press release here