Industry groups and green campaigners have warned the European Commission that Europe’s flagship energy-efficiency plan risks weakening efforts to save fuel.

The Commission is to publish the long-awaited energy-efficiency plan on Tuesday (8 March), but the Coalition for Energy Savings claims that the expected shift from “hard law” to “soft” non-binding strategies could undermine the goal of making 20% energy savings by 2020. “As it stands, the draft plan would lead to a rollback and softening of EU energy-efficiency policy,” the coalition said in a 1 March letter to the Commission.

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The coalition’s anxieties spring from the close links that the latest draft of the plan makes to the Europe 2020 strategy for jobs and growth, which relies heavily on non-binding peer review, rather than legislation.

Fiona Riddoch, the managing director of Cogen Europe, which represents the combined heat and power industry, said that this approach suggested that the energy-efficiency plan was “not going to drive further action and that, quite subtly, the ground may be shifting away from legislation”. She warned against assumptions that energy efficiency was “going to happen naturally”. Instead, it requires “real policy and legislative focus”, she insisted. “The energy-efficiency target is the one we are going to miss substantially”.

‘Stronger leadership’

Luigi Melli, the director-general of Ceced, a pan-European association for domestic appliances, agreed that “there has been an unjustified rollback”.

“There should be much stronger leadership from the Commission, because energy efficiency is the basis for whatever we do on the 2050 roadmap,” he said, a reference to the low-carbon economy plan that will be published on the same day.

For Jan te Bos, the director-general of the European Insulation Manufacturers Association, the chief concern is that energy-efficiency policy is “slipping off the agenda”. Despite its basically positive attitude, the Commission was “wrong to compromise too early”, he added.

The letter was signed by 23 organisations, including light-bulb makers, the copper and glass industries, and green groups, including Friends of the Earth and WWF.

In a statement issued yesterday (2 March), Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for energy, said that the Commission would “propose binding measures for saving energy”, listing targets on renovating public buildings, public procurement and obligations on large companies to do energy audits.