In the European Union Strategy, Energy Efficiency was recognised as a resource in its own right which should be enabled to compete on equal terms with generation capacity and to have primary consideration across all policies. However, the structure of energy demand as well as the real value and the (energy and non-energy) impacts of energy efficiency are still not well understood with the effect that benefits of energy efficiency are not sufficiently taken into account in financial and political decision making, and planning.

In 2018 the research projects should help to make the Energy Efficiency First principle more concrete and operational and to better understand its relevance for energy demand and supply and its broader impacts across sectors and markets. 

In 2019 the aim of the action is to deepen the demand side-related parameters in existing models and to include new aspects and data sources (e.g. by tapping DSOs modelling for forecasting of distributed loads).