Recommendations for promotion of combined heat and power directive - Euroheat & Power

Following the European Commission's announcement to launch a directive on the promotion of combined heat and power (CHP) as part of its follow-up package to the European Climate Change Programme, Euroheat & Power, the international association of district heating and cooling (DHC) and combined heat and power (CHP) welcomes this initiative as an important policy framework to give impetus to the development of this sector and to achieve progress towards the Community's target of an 18% CHP share in electricity generation in 2010.<P>Euroheat & Power believes that the Directive must give clear signals to the Member and Accession States as regards the role of the technology and the need to actively promote it in particular by means of rewarding / internalising its global benefits by appropriate mechanisms which could take - in line with the principle of subsidiarity - different forms such as grants, financial boni, tradeable certificates, tax refunds or exemptions.<P>The primary advantage of combined heat and power production is its high conversion efficiency which results in substantial energy and emissions savings. Euroheat & Power underlines the point that the identification of the CHP output (CHP heat, CHP electricity) has to be a key element of the future Community framework and urges the European Commission to adopt rules based in the laws of the thermodynamics and continuous metering in view of issuing guarantees of origin. The intention of this directive must be to provide a "corridor" for longer term action at national level and increase investors' security. Therefore and in the perspective of a common energy market it should contain a definition of CHP electricity and heat, which is based on a technically correct and (and thus politically stable In the longterm) standard based separation of condensing power and CHP electricity according to acknowledged engineering know-how.<P>Whereas the European Commission set a target of reaching an 18% CHP share until 2010 in its earlier strategy paper , progress up to now has rather been limited and therefore Euroheat & Power feels that national targets must be a key element of the directive to come. "We consider an ambitious burden-sharing mechanism to be an appropriate way to reinforce the commitment of the individual Member States to the common target", the association says by recalling that "this can only be effective if a correct definition and certification provide an accurate basis for monitoring both the baseline and the progress towards the goal".<P>