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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Climate change requires manufacturing companies to change the way they do business, by re-thinking products and services. Resource efficiency will be a key to success, but an increased cooperation among different business functions is fundamental. IoT, i.e. Internet of things, will be an important enabler and will help companies undergo such challenging transformation. The presentation held at Ponti conference organised by IDM Süd Tirol illustrates some key points and the links with energy efficiency and energy management.
Energy efficiency is the main pillar of the action required to save us and our planet. It is not just an issue of policies, but also the need of a different approach towards the use of energy. It requires manufacturing companies to re-think their businesses, incorporating resource efficiency not only for their sites, but also over all the supply chain. More than that, it means products and services should be re-designed and lower their environmental and social footprint.
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As thoroughly illustrated in my papers presented at ECEEE and IEPPEC 2018 conferences, the Italian white certificates scheme (WhC) has been facing in the last years serious issues, related to the lack of certificates to cover the scheme’s target, skyrocketing market prices, frauds with simplified (standard) energy saving assessment procedures, etc. In order to deal with such issues the Ministry of economic development issued decree D.M. 10 maggio 2018 to modify the WhC guidelines introduced in 2017. The presentation held at Ponti 2018 event in Bolzano briefly describes the main changes.
The Italian WhC scheme has been working since 2005, delivering more than 26 million tons of oil equivalent cumulated by the end of 2017. Despite its longevity and success in terms of savings results, many issues have arisen in the last years, due to a mix of factors: stricter and more complex rules, reduction of low hanging fruits, especially in the industrial sector, frauds, market rules and cost recovery mechanism. In my recent papers presented at ECEEE and IEPPEC conferences such issues are illustrated in details, together with the main rules, and the need of amendments is highlighted.
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