SEAI Energy Efficiency Report on Irish Policy Options
In this report SEAI presents evidence to inform Ireland’s national strategy to unlock the energy efficiency potential and meet the country’s energy efficiency targets, contributing:
• a detailed analysis of the potential for energy efficiency improvements across all major energy-consuming sectors in Ireland to 2020;
• an analysis of feasible policy interventions that would support the implementation of the identified measures;
• an assessment of the economy-wide implications for the Exchequer;
• a longer-term perspective to 2030 across the sectors studied.
The extent to which energy users will actually implement energy efficiency measures is considered in the context of a range of targeted policy options designed to influence uptake. In addition, scenarios are developed to present options for achieving the savings required to meet Ireland’s 2020 energy efficiency target.
IRELAND HAS SIGNIFICANT ENERGY SAVINGS POTENTIAL
This report identifies potential energy efficiency savings that amount to nearly a quarter of Ireland’s primary energy demand in 2013 (nearly 35 TWh). These savings are over and above what is required to bridge the current gap to the 2020 energy efficiency target. The identified measures are both technical and behavioural. Almost 75% of these measures are cost-effective whereby they reduce energy use and bring net financial savings in the long term. Yet despite being cost-effective much of the available energy saving potential remains untapped due to reasons such as market failure and barriers . Unlocking the savings requires a continuation and extension of existing policies and measures, as outlined in Ireland’s National Energy Efficiency Action Plan (NEEAP), as well as implementation of new measures, some of which are identified in this report. Figure 1 shows the energy efficiency cost curve across all demand-side sectors in Ireland3 . In absolute terms, the potential is largest in the residential buildings sector (13.5 TWh), followed by the transport (7.3 TWh), commercial buildings (6.0 TWh) and industry (4.8 TWh) sectors.
