Technical workshop Monitoring Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy indicators in Mediterranean Region, Beirut, 20-22 march 2019
24 May 2019

From 20 to 22 March 2019, a technical training workshop on energy efficiency and renewable energy indicators in the Mediterranean Region was held in Beirut bringing together twenty participants from Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

From 20 to 22 March 2019, a technical training workshop on energy efficiency and renewable energy indicators in the Mediterranean Region was held in Beirut bringing together twenty participants from Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Organized by ALMEE and ADEME and co-animated by ADEME and ENERDATA, this technical workshop aimed at presenting the data collection methodology, enabling the calculation of reliable and comparable indicators of energy efficiency by sectors in the countries.

Starting data collection

This technical workshop is part of the activity A1.2 of the Work Package 1, a component supporting public policies in the field of energy efficiency and renewable energies in the Mediterranean within the meetMED project, funded by the European Union and implemented. by MEDENER and RCREEE. Through capacity building of national agencies, this activity builds on a previous project, implemented between 2010 and 2013, called MED-IEE1, which carried out the development and the compilation on energy efficiency indicators in four Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Countries (Morocco Algeria, Lebanon, Tunisia) from 1990 to 2010, providing reliable and comparable trends in energy efficiency. This activity aims to update these indicators for the 2010-2017 period and to adjust to the new expectations of each of the target countries.

A training, exchange and sharing workshop

This workshop was the occasion to introduce these new objectives, to present the updated methodology, inspired by European approach (Odyssee-Mure project) as well as present the new data collection file, called MED’OBSERVEER. This bottom-up methodology is based on a techno-economic approach that enables energy efficiency indicators to be measured in each of the sectors, making possible to monitor the progress made and the achievement of macro objectives defined in the framework of Nationally Determined Contributions, declared within the Paris Agreement. This declination of sectoral indicators is a crucial decision-making tool to adjust public policies, explain trends and prioritize sectors of intervention. This workshop also enabled exchanges between countries on their expectations, their difficulties and their needs. Indeed, the challenges encountered are of various kinds, such as the absence of specific surveys of energy consumption in certain items, the specificity of economic structures in each country or the difficulty to access to some relevant data. Some good practices can be highlighted, such as the regular STEG five-year surveys of consumption in the residential sector in Tunisia or the annual publications carried out by APRUE, the Algerian agency, from the annual energy balances. However, the obstacles are still numerous to collect in a tune and lasting way the indicators monitoring public policies of energy efficiency. Hopefully, this approach will help to lay the ground for harmonized monitoring systems.

Perspectives

This workshop is therefore a first step to launch data collection in the target countries. A second workshop on the interpretation of the collected data will be organised in the coming months to take stock of the data collection and analyze the updated trends of the indicators. In parallel, identification work will be carried out in three English-speaking countries of the region (Egypt, Jordan and Palestine) in order to study the feasibility of similar approaches in these countries.