U.S. legislates on building efficiency, while EU fails to ringfence funding
Published on 5th May 2015
New legislation in the United States is expected to boost energy efficiency in buildings across the country.
The Energy Efficiency Improvement Act of 2015, signed into law last week, aims to provide incentives to cut energy use in commercial buildings, manufacturing plants and homes.
President Barack Obama hailed the bipartisan work on the legislation, which he said would “facilitate us being much smarter in terms of building buildings, how we use energy and, as a consequence, we’re going to save money for consumers, we’re going to save money for businesses, and we’re going to deal with issues like climate change that have an enormous economic and health impact on Americans as a whole.”
On this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, progress on building efficiency and the wider policy of demand management is threatened by a lack of funding for energy efficiency projects in the European Union, Interfax Global Energy reports.
The website said that MEPs voted in April against earmarking at least €5 billion (£3.7 billion) of EU funds for energy efficiency projects. The European Commission will still allocate funding to projects on an ad-hoc basis, but without a guaranteed sum the overall investment may well be lower than €5 billion.
The decision was criticised by Danish MEP Jeppe Kofod, who told a roundtable debate in Brussels in late April that the heating and cooling of buildings accounts for more than half of Europe’s energy consumption.
“Energy efficiency means renovating buildings, it means building grids. We need concrete funding for concrete projects,” he said.
Still, even without guaranteed EU funding, energy efficiency remains high on the political agenda as the European Union strives to meet its climate and energy targets by 2020.
