What are the challenges for energy efficiency? How is energy management changing? How can enterprises deal with the energy transition? I delivered a presentation on that at AIEE conference, in the session about energy efficiency in the energy industry, last December.
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That was more or less the question I was confronted with at the Eufores webinar The Green Deal and the National Energy and Climate Plans in Italy. More or less, because the original title stated “if energy efficiency makes business sense, why do some invest, and others don’t”, adding thus that energy efficiency makes business sense, so that the fact the some don’t invest appears even more strange. Let’s see if this is true and what can we do to add people the party that choses to act, with benefits both for him/his company and for us all.
In fact energy efficiency is usually considered cost effective, and that’s the reason why many think it should make business sense. Unfortunately that’s not the case. In my opinion, in fact, the main issue with energy efficiency is that it is unattractive. This is a serious issue, because many of our choices are emotional, not rational, and so unattractiveness wins against cost effectiveness. Nevertheless many invest, meaning that it is not all lost, and that there are options to overcome energy efficiency unattractiveness.
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The paper on white certificates in Italy I presented at the 2019 ECEEE conference. The paper goes through the whole life of the scheme, highlighting pros and cons of each phase, and tries to offer some insights to answer the question: will the scheme overcome the huge challenges it has been facing in the last three years?
I’ve been writing on the Italian white certificate scheme for many years now. Many papers are available on this blog. The present one, and the associated slides used for the speech at ECEEE summer study, are available below.
My idea is that the answer to the afore mentioned question can be positive. However, it requires the capability to find the right balance between precision and stringency on the one hand and the willingness to undergo a strong revision of the scheme on the other. FIRE is working hard to support the Italian policy makers and institutional stakeholders to find a way. What will be the future? Well, that’s for another paper…
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The energy industry is undergoing huge transformation and facing important challenges. Focussing on the electricity sector, it is not just distributed generation and non programmable renewable energy sources, nor the new opportunities linked to demand response. Over the last decades we passed from a model based on one or few large companies dealing with generation, distribution and supply to a liberalised market with a growing role played by small producers (prosumers). This is dramatically changing the electricity market and the way it works. I made some considerations at the AIEE symposium “Current and Future Challenges to Energy Security“.
My presentation opens by highlighting the path towards 2030 and the role of energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. I then show the steps of the transformation of the electricity sector from monopolies to distributed generation and the new demand response options made available by IoT and storage.
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I was involved over the last months in the organisation of the Sustainable Energy Investment forums in Italy. It’s a series of conferences roundtables and webinars aimed at creating the condition for financing the energy renovation of buildings through the involvement of financial institutions and other relevant stakeholders. The outcomes of the various working groups are quite interesting and useful and a lot of case studies, opportunities and possible solutions have indeed been shared. More than that, detailed discussion were carried on in different working groups, leading to interesting results. For this reason I kindly suggest to have a look at the proceedings, both conferences and roundtables (not only for Italy). As far as my blog, being involved in the topic of EPC for the energy renovation of public buildings in Italy, I wish to share the presentation I held at the SEI Forum in Malta.
The slides deal with the main facts about EPC for the energy renovation of public buildings and illustrates some examples both of service contracts and of PPP interventions.
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