Introduction The role and share of heating and ….docxVIP

Introduction: The role and share of heating and cooling in EU energy demandHeating and cooling in buildings, businesses and industry consume around half of the energy produced and used in the European Union. With 50% (546 Mtoe) of final energy consumption in 2012, it is the EU’s biggest energy sector. It is projected to remain the largest energy sector even in the long-term under both business-as-usual and decarbonisation scenarios by 2030 and 2050. Despite of its magnitude and importance in the European Unions energy markets, there is surprisingly little information about heating and cooling. This is a sector composed of a large number and variety of actors and technologies. The bulk of heating and cooling is consumed in buildings and industry. If we look at how this half of the EU’s final energy consumption that is used for heating and cooling, is distributed among the individual sectors, we see that the share of the residential sector is 45%, that of industry 37% and that of services is 18%. The exact sectoral and end-uses’ weights within the overall heating and cooling consumption change from Member State to Member State, depending on the economic structure (e.g. share of energy intensive industries) and other factors, such as climatic conditions, the efficiency of the building stock, etc. Technologies for heat production range from small decentralised applications, such as gas and biomass boilers, micro and small cogeneration units, heat pumps and individual solar thermal panels, to large-scale industrial boilers and furnaces and large centralised generation units in district heating networks. Likewise, cooling can be produced in decentralised applications using technologies from small air-conditioning units to large chillers and heat pumps. The capacity used for thermal energy generation ranges from 1 kW or below to several hundred MW units.Heat and cool cannot be transported economically on a long distance. Therefore, heating and cooling are produced and cons