The EPATEE Toolbox: a guide to help integrating evaluation into the cycle of energy efficiency policies

Date: 
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Category: 
Press Releases

EPATEE (Evaluation Into Practice to Achieve Targets for Energy Efficiency) is an EU funded 30-month project (May 2017 to September 2019) led by a consortium of 10 partners from 8 European countries. On the 26th of April, the EPATEE team made publicly available its Toolbox, as part of its ‘tools and capacity building’ mission: this online platform aims at guiding stakeholders, policy makers and implementers from EU Member States in the integration of an evaluation approach into the whole cycle of energy efficiency policies. The Toolbox assists them in selecting the most relevant tools, guidelines and references regarding their specific needs and expectations.

How to accurately assess the efficiency of a policy?
The EU Directives on energy efficiency such as the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) or the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) trigger a great variety of policies in EU Member States. But how effective are these policies in achieving energy savings targets? Several barriers limit policy evaluation and thus hinder target-based adaptions and continuous improvement of energy efficiency policies.

Engaging and activating policy makers and implementers
EPATEE aims at raising the capacity of policymakers and implementers for policy evaluation by providing them with tools and practical knowledge. This support is based on the analysis of existing evaluation experiences regarding a range of policy instruments, such as energy efficiency obligation schemes, regulations, financial incentives and voluntary agreements. Lessons learnt from these examples provide the basis for the development of guidelines and good practice evaluation tools.

How and what can we learn from the EPATEE Toolbox for ex-post evaluation?
The online Toolbox is the instrument developed by the EPATEE consortium to fulfill its ‘tools and capacity building’ goal. It provides general guidance on ex-post evaluation of energy efficiency policies as well as a knowledge base giving access to relevant and reliable references.
Furthermore, whether they are experienced or not, the Toolbox offers its users advanced guidance for practical situations corresponding to specific Combinations of Policy measure, Sector and calculation Method (PSMC). The platform offers a full description of how to execute the evaluation, given the needs and possibilities, for 30 specific PSMCs. The users are guided in their research via different menus and an interactive selection mechanism and can therefore quickly and easily find the combination they are looking for.
Besides, the platform assists the users in finding references of interest in the form of reports, studies or good practice guides via the Knowledge Base, of General Guidance content via its “Evaluation principle and methods” section and of internal EPATEE Notes (e.g. “Definitions related to Energy savings evaluation”, “Saving calculation methods and their application in the EPATEE Toolbox”, etc.).

To conclude, the EPATEE Toolbox provides policymakers and implementers valuable help in the integration of an evaluation process in the policies’ cycle, as it combines a reliable knowledge base, general guidance tools and different PSMCs in a single, publicly accessible and easy-to-use platform. Currently, the Toolbox contains 15 PSMC’s; this will be expanded to 30 PSMC’s that cover the most relevant combinations in practice.

The EPATEE Toolbox is available HERE.
It will be showcased during the next European EPATEE workshop on 13th of June in Brussels, together with presentations by experts from Member-States about their experience with evaluations. More details HERE.

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