International workshop on International Standards to Promote Energy Efficiency and Reduce Carbon Emissions

16 and 17 March 2009, Paris (France)

Wind turbine

The importance of standards for energy efficiency and carbon reduction

With volatile energy prices and growing energy security and climate change pressures, the need to effectively conserve energy in all sectors of the economy has never been higher. Since 2005 onwards, the IEA Energy Ministerial meetings and G8 summits have put energy efficiency improvement at the top of the policy agenda in recognition of the key role it has to play in increasing energy security and reducing greenhouse gas emissions while enhancing economic development objectives. Energy efficiency gains over the last four decades have already contributed more to energy services than any single fuel. For example, analyses have shown that energy efficiency improvements between 1973 and 2004 enabled IEA economies to use 56% less energy in 2004 than they would have needed for the same level of energy services had those efficiency gains not occurred. Looking into the future, through successive long-range global energy scenarios, the IEA has estimated that additional energy efficiency gains have the potential to achieve approximately half the public policy objective of bringing global energy-related CO2 emissions to 50% of 2000 levels by 2050 and that this can be delivered at less cost to society than energy services provided via conventional energy supplies. At the last 2008 G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, G8 leaders committed themselves to maximise their implementation of 25 energy efficiency policy measures recommended by the IEA which cover all major energy end-uses and that have the potential to reduce global energy demand by 20% in 2030, were all economies to adopt them.

Yet none of these measures can be implemented without technical standards to define and measure energy efficiency performance and without standardised methodologies to support the implementation of energy efficiency practices. Such technical standards are a key component underpinning all public- and private-sector actions to raise energy efficiency. While much energy efficiency standardization work has already been done, a great deal still remains to do if technical standards are to cover all energy end-uses and if it is to be possible to measure energy efficiency progressions from the micro to macro level. It is for this reason that the IEA, ISO and IEC have combined their resources to promote the issue; have established high-level committees to assess gaps in current energy efficiency standards portfolios; have issued a joint position paper on the topic and have made commitments to accelerate the rate of standards development in this field.

Goals and outcomes

This workshop jointly organized by the IEA, ISO and IEC brings together key actors in standardization, the private sector and public policy to map out the most important standardization areas that will be required to support energy efficiency and carbon reduction objectives and to draw attention to the urgent need to strengthen standardization efforts if the potential of energy efficiency gains are to be realised. It explores the key technical, policy and administrative themes pertaining to energy efficiency standardization in all energy usage sectors and aims to animate discussion and draw conclusions that can be fed into relevant high-level international processes including: