Dr. Franziska Lietz leads the environmental law team at the law firm Rechtsanwaltskanzlei Ritter Gent Collegen and has been advising on energy law for many years. Her focus areas include corporate compliance, such as legal waste management, chemical law issues, and plant-related emissions protection law. In energy law, her work encompasses the design of supply concepts with renewable energies, legal issues of electromobility, electricity storage (especially Power-to-Gas), the development of hydrogen infrastructures, and sector coupling. Additionally, she contributes to the development of the firm's digital legal consulting products and supports startups in the renewable energy and hydrogen sectors.
1. Dear Franziska, energy efficiency has recently played a dominant role in energy law. In which laws does it appear, and is there an official definition that clearly specifies what the legislator means by energy efficiency?
Exciting question! The term energy efficiency is used in many places in German law. However, there is no universally valid definition, which makes it a little difficult to define this term so precisely.
Let's start with the term with the same name, the Energy Efficiency Act. There is a nice, short and concise definition here: energy efficiency is the ratio of the yield of performance, services, goods or energy to the energy input. An increase in energy efficiency would therefore be an increase in this yield in relation to the use of a certain amount of energy.
The Federal Immission Control Act also requires operators of all licensed facilities (often in the industry) to use energy sparingly and efficiently as a basic obligation. However, this is not further specified.
Finally, the entitlement to certain privileges for energy-intensive companies is now always linked to energy efficiency or energy efficiency measures in return. The focus here is on measures that have been identified as part of an energy management system.
Although all three topics are about something similar and ultimately about reducing energy use for a specific output, the approaches and terms are by no means congruent.
2. energy efficiency improvements are used to approve funding measures. What grants are linked to the implementation of efficiency measures?
Yes, this is indeed a new "trend" in legislation, to only grant privileges in return for something in return. This comes from the EU Commission, which only wants to grant aid to companies with high energy consumption under this premise. This currently applies to the Energy Financing Act (EnFG), electricity price compensation and the BECV Ordinance on Measures to Prevent Carbon Leakage through National Fuel Emissions Trading (BEHG Carbon Leakage Ordinance - BECV).
3. in addition to operational efficiency, energy efficiency can also be considered systemically (i.e. the integration of renewable generation by means of flexibility). Do systemic efficiency efforts also count as ecological measures that can enable companies to receive subsidies?
No, in fact both the energy efficiency measures as part of the privileges and the requirements under the Energy Efficiency Act or the very broadly formulated requirements of the Federal Immission Control Act always refer to the company itself, i.e. everything downstream of the grid connection point within the customer's own installation. The term energy efficiency is therefore not extended to the electricity grid, a nationwide view or the integration of renewable energies, even if the latter would of course be an important concern in connection with flexibility.
4 From your personal point of view, would it be desirable to promote systemic efficiency as well as operational efficiency? And if so, how could this be implemented?
Of course, this is desirable. From a political or legislative perspective, however, it seems that the expansion of the grids is always given priority over flexibility. However, efforts to strengthen flexibility have also been made recently. This can be seen, for example, in Section 14a EnWG, which is intended to help relieve the low-voltage grids and primarily addresses more flexible applications such as charging points and heat pumps. Nevertheless, flexibility - even though it is often argued that it can make a significant contribution to reducing grid expansion - often seems like a "stepchild" of the energy transition.
However, with the increasing expansion of (mostly fluctuating) renewables, the issue is also becoming increasingly important. For example, it plays an important role for PPAs or renewable self-generation, the fact that the generation and consumption profiles are often not a good match plays a role. I would like to take this as an opportunity to draw attention to the EE Industrie initiative, which is being driven forward by the founder of our law firm, Kai Gent. Here, a group of energy-intensive companies is not only trying to jointly develop renewable electricity generation, but also to distribute the load in such a way that it best matches the generation profile, e.g. through power-to-heat. In my view, however, it is a shame that industrial companies have to take this into their own hands and that the legislator offers little support.
5 Thank you very much for your time and your interesting comments. Finally, we would like to ask you a "make a wish" question: How would you draft a law to help companies align their processes even more with renewable generation?
It's not that simple. I think it would require a whole box of instruments. To pick out individual points that I think are important, I would first suggest that the conditions for PPAs be facilitated in such a way that companies PPAs as easily as a simple electricity supply contract, e.g. by eliminating difficulties with regard to balancing. It should also be made easier for industrial companies to increase their electrification; high construction cost subsidies for any necessary expansion of the grid connection and the general increase in grid fees are currently having an adverse effect. But as I said, the most important thing is actually a consistent overall system that sensibly combines generation and consumption, but also flexibility and constancy (e.g. base load, inflexible processes).
