The International Energy Agency (IEA) released two guides last month to assist countries in developing ambitious energy efficiency policies, showing policymakers, analysts and statisticians how to better track and use data on hidden fuel.

The IEA regards energy efficiency as an important way of improving energy security and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. However, measuring energy efficiency is not always easy, as there are wide variations in the way countries collect energy efficiency data, if it is collected at all.

In its inaugural ‘Energy Efficiency Market Report’, released last year, the IEA noted that more data on energy efficiency – and more robust indicators – were needed worldwide to help craft more effective policies.

The two new IEA publications – Energy Efficiency Indicators: Fundamentals and Statistics and Energy Efficiency Indicators – Essentials for Policy Making – address this challenge by providing the necessary tools to initiate and further develop in-depth, appropriate and reliable energy efficiency indicators to help countries set energy efficiency targets and track progress towards these goals.

“If the world wants to avoid a temperature increase of 5 ºC or 6 ºC by the end of the century, then ambitious programmes of energy efficiency have to be launched in all sectors and in all countries,” says IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven.

She notes that the IEA’s new manuals on energy efficiency indicators will help countries design and implement dynamic, viable energy efficiency programmes.

The manual dealing with the fundamentals on energy efficient statistics is intended for statisticians and energy analysts collecting the information required to develop energy efficiency indicators.

Inadequate resources, expertise and practices are often put forward to explain the lack of data and indicators. However, surveying, metering and modelling practices exist worldwide and making the practices available to all is the purpose of this manual.

After having identified the most common sectoral indicators, the manual provides more than 160 practices used worldwide for collecting the data to develop these indicators.

The manual dealing with the essentials of policymaking aims to provide policymakers and energy analysts with the tools needed to determine the priority areas for the development of energy efficiency indicators and to develop the data and indicators that will best support energy efficiency policymaking.

In addition, these indicators provide a basis for international comparisons that can help identify best practices for effective policy design and implementation.

By limiting energy demand, energy efficiency measures can increase resilience to a variety of risks, lower stress on energy infrastructure and reduce disruptions to energy supply systems.

‘

Energy Technology Perspectives 2014’, a report which the IEA published last month, indicated that if governments were to meet the goal of limiting the rise in global temperatures to no more than 2 ºC, energy efficiency will need to play a key role, contributing to between one-third and one-half of all the required future energy and emissions savings.