New report launched on Australia’s progress towards the UN #SDGs shows gains in #health, #education 
& #employment but less success in reducing household #debt, housing affordability & action on #ClimateChange.
www.sdgtransformingaustralia.com

Multiple Benefits project partners to collaborate with businesses to improve competitive advantage and energy performance.

The EU-funded Horizon 2020 project “Valuing and Communicating the Multiple Benefits of Energy Efficiency” today launched its new web site. The site will serve as a platform for collaboration between project partners and businesses to make energy efficiency investments a lasting competitive advantage.

Why don’t companies invest more in energy efficiency? One answer is that efficiency projects are not viewed as strategic priorities. While energy engineers propose projects based on energy savings and payback, investment committees prioritise projects on the basis of strategic impacts to the company.

By quantifying and communicating multiple benefits of energy efficiency – like improved product quality, enhanced worker productivity, improved indoor air quality, reduced maintenance costs – energy efficiency can become strategic.

But, what does strategic mean? “An investment is strategic if it contributes to create, maintain or develop a sustainable competitive advantage” says Dr. Catherine Cooremans, a project partner from the Université de Lausanne who specialises in the strategic and cultural dimensions of investment decision-making.

Developing a training platform and toolkit with and for businesses

Starting in 2019, the project team will offer businesses a training platform and toolkit, including analysis methods and communication tools.

Partners will work directly with at least 50 businesses to analyse, communicate and evaluate the strategic impacts of energy-saving actions. In parallel, Multiple Benefits partners will compile a public evidence base of case studies, project examples and results to bolster investment proposals.

More information

The project website is now launched at the following URL: www.m-benefits.eu. Companies and others who are interested in learning more should sign up for the mailing list

The IEc team applied a mixed-methods design to evaluate the US DOE’s Building America (BA) program, a residential large-scale technology demonstration, peer-to-peer information exchange and market diffusion program for residential energy efficiency (EE) technologies and practices. BA advanced the systems engineering, whole house approach to residential EE that has become the standard practice. BA’s marque intervention is the use of building teams, comprised of production homebuilders and building science experts, that work together to conduct large scale demonstrations of EE practices and refine approaches until they are cost-effective.1 Many EE construction approaches have gained market acceptance as a result of BA’s work, including the air tightness, duct tightness, envelope insulation, and thermal bridging requirements that were integrated into EnergyStar Homes and into IECC model energy code.

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Can Europe deliver on energy efficiency? Investigating the effectiveness of Article 7 of the Energy Efficiency Directive

Webinar #3 of the Energy Evaluation Academy. Speakers: Dr. Jan Rosenow (RAP) and Dr. Tina Fawcett (Oxford University).

View the recordings of the webinar here.

Download the slides here.

Article 7 is a key provision of the European Energy Efficiency Directive which established a set of binding measures to help the EU reach its 20% energy efficiency target by 2020. Each Member State has to calculate its own savings target, and demonstrate how it will deliver the target between 2014 and 2020.

This webinar introduced the main features of Article 7, showed how Member States have implemented it, and discussed the challenge of evaluating its impact given the heterogeneity of policy responses.

The webinar concluded with a number of options how a revised Article 7 could be simplified and streamlined, how transparency of implementation could be improved and how Member States could be supported to deliver energy efficiency more effectively.