Policy paper
Best practices and legal barriers for supplying REScoops and promoting energy efficiency
Energy efficiency is crucial to reach the European Union’s (EU’s) short, medium and long-term climate and energy targets. This fact has been reaffirmed by the new Clean Energy for All Europeans legislative package (CEP) and its integration of the “Energy Efficiency First” principle. Furthermore, the European regulatory framework has increased its objectives for the amended Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) with a binding energy efficiency target of 32.5% by 2030.
This vision is unfortunately difficult to put in practice and several Member States are still implementing “statistical tricks” in order to deliver on their promised energy savings for their 2020 energy savings targets, or are refusing altogether to work to reduce energy consumption and decarbonise their national production.
In the meantime, the cooperative movement is mobilising to help deliver national objectives and support their communities on the way to the transition. Through the REScoop PLUS project, several Energy Efficiency services were launched in Portugal, France and Italy. Indeed, the services provided by the REScoops to their members are usually open to the wider public and are therefore accessible to all. They are all collected in an energy efficiency toolkit.
The goal of this report is to explore the deployment of the tools from the toolkit and identify the barriers, specifically legal, the implementing REScoops experienced. This report presents the lessons learned from the deployment of REScoop PLUS best practices and provides recommendations for future policy changes.