Transposition of Art 9 EnergyEfficicenyDirective

Project status

completed
project duration: 03/2020 – 07/2020

According to Art. 9b (1) of the EU Energy Efficiency Directive (EED 2018), individual consumption meters or heat cost allocators must be installed in buildings with several flats that have a central heating or cooling system or are supplied via district heating/district cooling, if this is technically feasible and cost-efficient. In addition, according to Art. 9c, newly installed meters and heat cost allocators must be remotely readable from 26 October 2020, so that consumption information can be made available to users during the year.

The aim of this project was to determine uniform and comprehensible criteria for the national implementation of Art. 9b EED, especially with regard to the criteria for "technical feasibility" and "cost efficiency".

On the cost side, the costs associated with individual metering and intra-year consumption information represent the input parameters. Basically, three types of costs have to be differentiated, which have to be considered when determining the cost efficiency:

• Investment costs for the metering equipment, often compensated by an ongoing fee for the provision of the metering equipment (rent).
• Ongoing periodic costs for operation, inspection and maintenance of the metering equipment incl. calibration (device replacement)
• Service costs for meter reading, cost allocation and billing, plus - newly added - remote reading and consumption information during the year.

There are numerous studies on the energy savings, on the basis of which the orders of magnitude for the expected energy savings can be assumed: energy savings of 20% can be expected on the basis of individual consumption determination, and energy savings of 5% can be achieved through the information on consumption during the year.

An important result of this project is that due to the high energy efficiency in new buildings (basis OIB-RL 2019), individual consumption recording combined with intra-year consumption information is predominantly not cost-efficient for newly constructed buildings, assuming average costs and savings. This generally applies to the equipment with heat meters and predominantly also to heat cost allocators.

After the adjustment of the heating energy demand limits in new buildings from 1 January 2021, individual consumption recording in combination with consumption information during the year is not cost-efficient assuming average costs and savings, i.e. neither equipment with heat meters nor the cheaper variant with heat cost allocators.

The results of this project were discussed in a broad circle of experts (including the real estate sector, energy industry, Chamber of Labour, measurement technology companies) and serve as support for the legal implementation of the requirements of the EED 2018, although this is in no way prejudiced by the results of the project.