Making the results of bottom-up energy savings comparable

The Energy Service Directive (ESD) has pushed forward the issue of energy savings calculations without clarifying the methodological basis. Savings achieved in the Member States are calculated with rather non-transparent and hardly comparable Bottom-up (BU) methods. We develop the idea of parallel evaluation tracks separating the Member States’ issue of ESD verification and comparable savings calculations. The idea is analogous to the calculation of unemployment rates, where a common European calculation routine exists which is independent from national methodologies. Comparability is ensured by developing a standardised BU calculation kernel for different energy efficiency improvement (EEI) actions which simultaneously depicts the different calculation options in a structured way (e.g. baseline definition, system boundaries, double counting). Due to the heterogeneity of BU calculations the approach requires a central database where Member States feed in input data on BU actions according to a predefined structure (e.g. XML standard). The paper demonstrates the proposed approach including a concrete example of application.