The increasingly urgent environmental European policies also involve awareness of consumption in order to improve energy efficiency.
This is one of the key points of the European Directive 2018/2002 of the European Parliament and Council of the European Union amending the previous directive, on a proposal from the European Commission and after transmission of the draft legislative act to the national parliaments.
The Directive was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 21 December 2018 and entered into force on 24 December of the same year. It is a significant step in the European Union’s environmental strategy, aiming at achieving a 20% and 32.5% improvement in energy efficiency by 2020 and 2030 respectively.
One of the passages of the new text directly affects our sector amending article 9 of the previous Directive starting from the title, which now reads “Metering for gas and electricity”, and implementing additional articles.
Article 9a
Metering for heating, cooling and domestic hot water
The two points of this article state that the Member States shall provide final customers with meters that accurately reflect their actual consumption, and that where heating, cooling or domestic hot water is supplied to a building from a central source that services multiple buildings or from a district heating or district cooling system, a meter shall be installed at the heat exchanger or point of delivery.
Article 9b
Sub-metering and cost allocation for heating, cooling and domestic hot water
The three points of this article require that in multi-apartment and multi-purpose buildings with a central heating or central cooling source individual meters shall be installed to measure the consumption of heating, cooling or domestic hot water for each building unit. Member States shall ensure they have in place transparent national rules on the allocation of the cost consumption in such buildings to ensure accuracy of accounting for individual consumption.
Article 9c
Remote reading requirement
For the provisions of articles 9a and 9b to be effective, meters and heat cost allocators installed after 25 October 2020 shall be remotely readable devices. By 1 January 2027 there shall be no meters which cannot be read remotely, meaning that the devices installed before 25 October 2020 must be rendered remotely readable or, where not possible, replaced with remotely readable devices.
The full text of the Directive is available at http://bit.ly/2PicOBb
