On June 14th 2012, the European Parliament and the Council reached an agreement on the Commission proposal for an Energy Efficiency Directive repealing the EU's Cogeneration (2004) and Energy Services Directives (2006) as these had failed to fully tap the energy saving potential in the EU member states.

Several provisions of the proposal targeted industry directly. Most of these provisions have now been either improved and or are in the hands of the member states to decide.

However, energy efficiency obligation schemes may lead to a further increase in power prices in Europe and the costs passed on to private households and businesses. The schemes oblige either all distributors or all retail energy sales companies to achieve annual energy savings equal to between at least 1% in 2014 and 1.5% in 2018 of their energy sales among final customers.

Steelmakers may be affected both as obligated party and as final customer, if not exempted on member state level. This would constitute another driver of costs for EU steelmakers, which are at their technical limits of improving energy efficiency of their installations. However, the directive encourages an exemption for certain ETS sectors, inter alia by referring to the risk of carbon leakage.

Source - EUROFER

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