After the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, European countries have put in motion or accelerated plans for energy independence, both by speeding up renewables, but also pushing for a strong energy consumption reduction through savings and efficiency measures, at an emergency level, but also aiming at long term savings.
In July 2022, the European Commission presented the proposal for a Regulation “Save gas for a safe winter”. Following a simplified legislative procedure, Member States reached the political agreement on a voluntary reduction of 15% in gas consumption from August 2022, becoming mandatory in the event of an alert.
In this report, EnR consulted its 24 member agencies on measures being considered or implemented to meet the target reductions on gas usage and overall energy savings (information from agencies labelled alphabetically in the supplemental data spreadsheet). Complementarily, EnR conducted initial research in news outlets on measures being taken (information from news outlets labelled numerically in the supplemental data spreadsheet).
The resulting list of measures, presented in this report, attempts to capture generic types of measures towards similar goals in different countries. The list includes both measures already approved and under implementation, as well as measures which were considered for implementation, as they might prove useful for the debate. Following the same rationale, measures which are not mandatory, but are being pursued/fostered/incentivized as recommendations, with targeted communications to consumers, commerce and services or industry, were also included. Many of these may produce immediate effects in energy savings but depend on behaviour change by consumers and businesses and are not directly enforceable by public policy.
Click on the images below to see the REPORT and SUPPLEMENTAL DATA spreadsheet.
