Ex-ante estimation of the EU Ecodesign Directive’s impact on the long-term electricity demand of the tertiary sector

摘要

Ex-ante evaluation is important to effectively design policymeasures. The paper addresses the electricity demand of thetertiary sector in Europe which is one of most strongly growing.Different scenarios which are characterized by differentlevels of policy measures and programmes are analysed by usinghybrid techno-economic bottom-up model. It differentiatesbetween 29 countries, 8 sub-sectors and 15 building anduser related energy-services such as lighting in buildings, streetlighting, electric heating, ventilation and cooling, refrigeration,cooking, laundry, ICT devices and data centres with servers.Electricity demand is obtained through physical drivers andspecific energy consumption indicators. The latter consist oftechnical information such as installed power, energy demandper unit of driver, and utilisation rates such as full load hours.Energy-efficiency measures aim at reducing both installedpower and utilization rates and cover technologies and practices.Substitution technologies such as heat pumps, organisationaland operational measures such as control systems (e.g.occupancy and daylight controls), as well as facility managementand building energy management systems are considered.Referring to the EuP and the EPBD-recast as well as a numberof soft policies such as energy labelling and energy audits theimpact of a bundle of different policy measures is estimated bya comparative analysis of different scenarios. As the model alsoconsiders growing drivers enabling drawing a comprehensivepicture of the net demand development. Mostly growing factorsare the number of employees or floor area, specific energyservice drivers such as equipment or diffusion rates (e.g. shareof cooled floor area, no. of computers per employee).Results show that electricity demand in the EU tertiary sectorwill continue to grow in the coming years. However, the policiescurrently implemented and foreseen for implementationwill mitigate this effect to a large extent and demand tends tostabilize in the long term, particularly if the Ecodesign Directiveis (EDD) is consequently implemented and enforced basedon the least lifecycle cost approach and if it is accompanied byadditional soft policies to address energy-efficiency measures(EEMs), such as system optimization or behavioural measures.Moreover energy services not covered by the EDD should beimplementing covered.