Guidance for the comprehensive assessment of efficient heating and cooling

The Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) seeks to promote energy security, to decrease the climate impact from energy consumption and to improve the economic balance. Article 14 of the EED seeks to identify potentials for increasing energy efficiency through cogeneration, district heating and cooling (DHC) and the utilization of excess heat sources. According to Article 14, the MSs must carry out comprehensive assessments (CAs) of the potentials for increasing energy efficiency with high-efficiency cogeneration and efficient DHC. CA is a techno-economic methodology aiming at identifying potentials with a costbenefit analysis. This handbook aims to provide guidelines for the next round of comprehensive assessments that are to be carried out in 2019–20. Furthermore, this report aims at providing recommendations for updating the Article 14 framework for CAs at the European level. It thus addresses both the national and the EU level. This report addresses four main issues with the CAs and provides recommendations for improvements. 1) The scope of comprehensive assessments should be expanded in both a temporal and energy system domain aspect. This ensures that the intermittency of variable renewables is captured in the analyses and energy sector coupling benefits can be found. 2) Economic assessments should be clearer in their use of assumptions and model inputs. 3) Data collection practices regarding H&C should be improved across the EU-28. 4) The methodological approach could be improved to promote comparable results across CAs, while MSs should still have the possibility to make relevant analyses for their respective areas and needs.