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Publications - European Commission
Heat From Renewable Energy Sources |
Issued by the European Commission's Intelligent Energy Executive Agency (IEEA), this report presents a series of international projects supported by the European Union's Intelligent Energy Europe (IEE) programme.
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Report
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Introduction
The heating / cooling sector consumes 49% of the final energy in the EU, or almost as much as transport and electricity combined. Most of this thermal energy is produced from fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal). In 2004 renewable sources of energy such as biomass, solar and geothermal energy provided 49 Mtoe: 8.4% of total heat consumption. RES heating and cooling in the EU is dominated by biomass (>50% of which is household heat), which with the enlargement to EU-27 technically could provide for at least 133 Mtoe by 2020. As regards solar thermal, in the period up to the end of 2005 there have been over 16 million m2 of collectors installed in the EU, but over 70% of this capacity has been installed just in 3 European countries (Germany, Greece and Austria). In 2005, the share of geothermal energy sources (both deep and ambient sources) was below 0.5% of the overall consumption of thermal energy in the EU-25 providing around 1,8 Mtoe. However, in order to reach the RES targets for 2010 of the EU White Paper on Renewable Energy COM(97)599 final this production of heating/cooling from geothermal sources of energy in the EU-25 should grow to 3.2 Mtoe. The European policy framework clearly promotes renewable energy sources although unlike in the area of RES electricity or liquid biofuels for transport, the sector of renewable heating and cooling is not subject to dedicated European legislation. Difficulties with the development of EU legislation on RES heating and cooling are partly related to the fact that there is no common European market for heat as this commodity (or service) is by nature a local issue with major differences in heating/cooling demands, existing infrastructure, and availability of RES sources between EU countries and even between regions within the same Member States. The EU existing legislation that already promotes renewable energy heating includes Directive 2002/91/EC on the energy performance of buildings (OJ L1/65, 4.1.2003), which for example, imposes a requirement on Member States that technical, environmental and economic feasibility of alternative systems are made for any new buildings with a total useful floor area over 1000 m2 covering RES and district or block heating or cooling , if available. Another directive 2004/8/EC on the promotion of cogeneration (OJ L52/50, 21.2.2004) also indirectly promotes RES-H as it requires that analyses of national potentials referred to in Article 6 shall consider the type of fuels that are likely to be used to realise the cogeneration potentials, including specific considerations on the potential for increasing the use of renewable energy sources in the national heat markets via cogeneration. A recent initiative of the European Commission, which is directly relevant to RES heating and cooling, is the EU Biomass Action Plan (COM(2005) 628 final) that lists a number of measures to be taken by the European Commission from 2006 onwards, including:
The report covers a number of biomass-related projects, shown in bold in the following contents list.
Contents
Table of contents
Introduction
New Projects (start 2007)
© Copyright 2006 Policy Statements
Updated
by CPL Press:
03/07/2007
- biomatnet@biomatnet.org
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