Multiple Benefits of EU Energy Efficiency Potential 2030

Measures to improve energy efficiency not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduce, inter alia, air pollution and its impact on health, ecosystems, resources, labour markets, energy prices and security.
These impacts have been studied in previous research mostly separately. This article "The Multiple Benefits of the 2030 EU Energy Efficiency Potential" studies them in a consistent manner across the EU. The research was a joint research effort across five European institutions, authors include, among others, Johannes Thema, Felix Suerkemper, Jens Teubler, Dr. Stefan Thomas, and Jana Rasch from the Wuppertal Institute.

The work is based on a detailed stock-model based energy efficiency scenario for the entire European Union (EU). The team quantified many of these multiple impacts of energy efficiency actions for all EU member states, applying existing approaches and partly further developing methods. Authors integrated the effects into a cost-benefit analysis: "We found that, with a conservative estimate, the multiple benefits account for at least 50 per cent of the energy cost savings - with significant impacts arising, for example, from air pollution, reduced energy poverty and economic impacts," says Johannes Thema from the Energy Policy Research Unit in the Division of Energy, Transport and Climate Policy at the Wuppertal Institute.

The complete article is open access and can be found free of charge in the following link.