Clean Energy package - „a problem child“ has been a bit tamed.

The Confederation of Industry is constantly keeping an eye on the development of the Clean Energy Package; including its sensitive part known as Energy Efficiency Directive (EED).

We support the principle of enhancing energy efficiency. In fact, in order to remain cost-competitive, our companies have invested in energy efficiency measures early on and continue to do so as decreasing the energy consumption reduces the operating costs. This has allowed Europe to become the most energy efficient economy in the world.

Further, in most cases the European industries have already applied best available technologies and any further improvement is achievable only at extreme costs. Even the European Commission target of 30% absolute savings by 2030 and keeping the ratio of new annual savings at 1,5 % per year towards 2030 was considered too ambitious. As proven by an expert study from last year, the minimum costs for such goals in case of the Czech Republic would reach more than a half of billion CZK.

We were extremely concerned by both the ENVI and the ITRE committee call for raising the 2030 energy efficiency target even further to 40 percent and for removing necessary flexibility for individual member states in Article 7. As stated by the study mentioned such scenario would increase the expected costs well above 2 billion CZK, almost twice as much the annual Czech national budget.

Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic is closely cooperating with other Central European business organizations from Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia in The CEE Industry and Employers Federation Initiative. We were quickly able to found a common speech and have sent a letter to all our European Parliament members with above mentioned concerns to underline our constant lobbying activities to assert interests of our members.

Our joint effort has helped to change the trajectory of this legislation to a more industry friendly direction. We have achieved the change of the absolute savings target to 35% and we have reached better flexibility for the member states as in Article 7.

Even though there still remains space for improvement in this legislation we consider this as a proof of the successful cooperation of the Central European industrial confederations and as another confirmation that creating such alliances and searching for common interests is highly important.

Tereza Řezníčková
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