Updated: 2020 (links), 2008 (edit), 2005.

June 22, 2005, the EU Commission launched a "Green Paper on Energy Efficiency or Doing More With Less" to start a discussion on how the EU countries can benefit from cost-effective energy efficiency measures. The debate lasted throughout 2005, and to guide the discussion the paper identified 25 key questions for the discussion.

The EU Energy Ministers' meeting on June 28, 2005 welcomed the Green Paper. The Ministers as well as the EU Parliament discussed the paper in more detail in the autumn.
Consecutively to these debates, the EU Commission published an Action Plan for Energy Efficiency (COM(2006)545 final) on October 19, 2006. The review of the Action Plan is here.

June 22, 2005, INFORSE-Europe commented on the Green Paper, asking for concrete activities and targets. While the initial press release argued for targets of minimum 20% for 2020 and 14% for 2015, INFORSE-Europe finds that higher targets could be cost effective with the current high energy prices (the 20% target for 2020 is mentioned in the Green Paper as an example of a cost-effective target, based on previous, lower energy prices)

Read INFORSE-Europe's press release on June 22, 2005 ( pdf file 226kB), welcoming the Green Paper and asking Europe to do more.

The original communication on the "Green Paper on Energy Efficiency or Doing More With Less" was at the European Commission's web site of ec.europa.eu/energy/demand, which was moved to eur-lex.europa.eu EU Green Paper on Energy Efficiency from where you can download also the EU Green Paper document as pdf.

>> Return to INFORSE-Europe's EU policy