Energy efficiency front and center in new EU climate package

On November 30, 2016, the European Union’s Commissioner for Climate Actions & Energy, Miguel Arias Cañete, announced the details of a major clean energy package. Front and center in the plan are the EU’s new target of an at least a 30% increase in energy efficiency compared with 1990 levels. That is up from a pre-existing target of 27%.
 
The strategy is intended to help the EU to become less dependent on energy imports, create jobs and reduce emissions that contribute to climate change.
 
“Europe is on the brink of a clean energy revolution,” Miguel Arias Cañete told a press conference in Brussels. “And, just as we did in Paris, we can only get this right if we work together.”
 
The bloc’s vice president for energy union, Maroš Sefcovic added: “This is really something of a transformational nature that we are proposing – perhaps the biggest since the central power systems were built in Europe.”
 
The commission says that the new package’s benefits include a €177 billion ($252 billion Canadian) mobilization of public and private investment per year in the next decade, which is expected to create as many as 900,000 new green tech jobs and spur a 1% increase in GDP.