Last week Sabine Pahl attended the eceee summer study in France. The eceee (European Council for an Energy Efficient Economy) summer study brings together policy, research and commercial perspectives. Keynote talks ranged from a strategic overview of challenges in European Energy policy to a critical assessment of the UK’s green deal. Others gave specific examples of energy efficiency programmes (e.g., Bristol City Council) or discussed the role of energy efficiency in the context of climate change (Friends of the Earth).

According to Sabine: “Meeting researchers from all over Europe, the USA and Australasia provided great insight into the similarities and differences inherent in the energy challenge. I didn’t know beforehand that emissions from the building sector vary so widely across Europe (low in Sweden and Bulgaria, but high in the UK and Germany, from Claudia Canevari’s talk, European Commission, DG Energy), or that the number of energy efficiency measures taken by householders in the UK had dropped so drastically this year (from Jan Rosenow’s / Nick Eyre’s talk, ECI Institute Oxford).

I learned a lot about the EVALOC project led by Rajat Gupta (www.evaloc.org.uk) and about a range of data sharing and networking activities, both on the technical and behaviour side. E.g., the global buildings performance network held a workshop on data collaboration (www.gbpn.org), and the Energy Saving Trust holds a data base called embed (contact embed@est.org.uk). The International Energy Agency is building a network of behaviour change researchers through their demand side management (DSM) task 24. Gesche Huebner from the UCL Energy Institute presented very interesting data on different heating profiles, challenging the notion that we can assume households behave similarly.

This is only a snapshot and brief selection of all the debates and contacts – others included the German consumer organisation (Verbraucherzentrale), EDF, the European Environmental Bureau, etc. … All very exciting times for energy researchers, and I look forward to the next Eceee summer study!”