How can governments stimulate energy-efficiency improvement? This book analyzes environmental policy in the Netherlands to present a wealth of empirical results on the successes and failures of governmental initiatives in environmental policy. Discussion extends to such topics as free-rider effects of subsidies, the credibility of voluntary agreements, the art of regulation and the fate of research & development money.

This book is devoted to investigating the policy design and effectiveness of financial and market-based instruments to promote energy efficiency financing. The concept of this monograph is to present the latest results related to energy efficiency funding schemes, energy efficiency obligations, voluntary agreements, auction mechanisms, and Super Energy Services Companies (Super ESCOs) in major jurisdictions across the world. The book focuses on financial and market-based instruments as they deliver a price signal, which provides an incentive for firms to invest in innovation or implement more energy-efficient technologies and deliver energy savings while minimizing costs. Such instruments can have significant advantages for the government, supporting the fiscal sustainability of the government’s energy efficiency efforts, requiring less enforcement than regulation and according the market flexibility to select the most cost-efficient technologies. This book is highly recommended to researchers, policy experts, and business specialists who seek an in-depth and up-to-date integrated overview of energy efficiency financing.

Energy audits are key to increase investments in energy efficiency This paper assesses the effectiveness of policy interventions in promoting energy audits by relying on evidence from a unique experiment. The findings of the experiment allow us to quantify by how much the probability that firms invest in energy audits increases, as the policy mix changes.

'Increasing energy-efficiency is important because it offers the prospect of partly solving our climate change and energy security problems without pain. This book sheds further light on the issue, focusing on energy-extensive economic activities which, by sheer volume, collectively use a substantial amount of energy. That simple fact alone makes this book worthwhile, but there are many other gems.' Richard Tol, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Ireland This innovative book explores the adoption of energy-saving technologies and their impact on energy efficiency improvements. It contains a mix of theoretical and empirical contributions, and combines and compares economic and physical indicators to monitor and analyse trends in energy efficiency. The authors pay considerable attention to empirical research on the determinants of energy-saving investment including uncertainty, energy-price volatility and subsidies. They also discuss the role of energy modelling in policy design and the potential effect of energy policies on technology diffusion in energy-extensive sectors. Written from a multi-disciplinary perspective, this book will appeal to academics and graduates in the areas of energy-saving technologies, energy economics and natural resource economics, as well as policy-makers particularly those in energy policy.

The EU’s Directive 2012/27/EU on energy efficiency obliges Member States to develop programmes to encourage small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to improve energy efficiency by implementing energy audits and the recommendations that stem from these audits. This study looks at the barriers that SMEs face and the existing policy instruments in more detail and analyses which practices are working. The study concludes that SMEs cannot be effectively targeted with solely uniform solutions even within the same country and even though many of them face similar barriers. More emphasis is needed on sharing information and best practices and guiding SMEs to implement energy efficiency improvements after having identified the opportunities. The good news is that many good practices already exist and there is potential to improve. Now it is just a question of taking action.

​Energy efficiency contributes to the main objectives of energy policy in the European Union: energy security, cost effectiveness and environmental benefits. However, the efficiency potential remains widely untapped. Will White Certificate Instruments, a new framework instrument to foster end-use energy efficiency, help to close the energy efficiency gap? The analysis compares the political process of choosing and designing White Certificate Instruments in Italy, France and Great Britain. The book shows that the type of policy instrument as well as its image has an influence not only on agenda-setting but also on the policy instrument’s effectiveness due to interactions with existing energy efficiency discourses, regulatory traditions and the prevailing policy style.