The Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy Foundation (IEECP) has published a new report on micro-enterprises and data deficiencies. Micro-enterprises represent major share of EU firms and account for almost 19.8% of EU value added, yet they remain invisible in energy statistics and energy efficiency policy evaluation. This invisibility is not only a matter of missing data but also a classification problem, since energy use is commonly allocated to household, commercial, or industrial sectors based on metering and contract arrangements rather than enterprise characteristics.
This paper looks at how this lack of visibility affects how we design and evaluate energy efficiency policies for micro-enterprises. It combines a review of data availability across 10 EU Member States with a case study from Croatia, which involved a survey of 470 micro-enterprises. The survey investigated how households and businesses overlap in workspace use, energy bills and vehicle ownership.
The results underline the urgent need to improve the statistical visibility of micro-enterprises and to address mixed household and business energy use in policy design and evaluation.
The full report is available here.
External link
Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 