DEESME
Developing national schemes for energy efficiency in SMEs
Unlike the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and large companies, SMEs have less technical human and financial resources to improve their energy efficiency. Barriers have been deeply investigated including lack of awareness, low capital and difficulty to access financing, doubts around actual saving potential and the lack of technical human resources. So, national schemes are finalized to provide them with technical resources such as methodologies, best practices, technologies inventories and subsidies. Some of the schemes introduce mandatory actions (energy analysis) to obtain such subsidies. Nevertheless, national policy schemes have failed to some extent to convince SMEs that the energy audit is something more than a “bureaucratic fulfilment” to obtain a contribution and to push also large companies to take the step from the analysis to the investment.
To overcome that, DEESME aims at:
a) Enabling companies to manage the energy transition by taking profit of multiple benefits and energy management approaches
b) Supporting the development and the implementation of EU policies on energy efficiency in the framework of art. 8 of EED beyond the project by providing national authorities with guidelines proposals and recommendations on how to strengthen the national schemes.
c) Enhancing the adoption of the DEESME approach by National Authorities beyond the project timeline through the implementation of institutionalization activities. DEESME will target primarily National Authorities to address their needs from the incumbent policies and to make them aware of the resources available to empower their schemes under art. 8 using the multiple benefits approach. Moreover, it will also target SMEs to assist them to develop and test the technical DEESME solutions by organising information and training initiatives, realising energy audit and implementing energy management systems starting from international standard and adding the multiple benefits energy efficiency approach.