Policy Instruments to Foster Energy Efficiency - Green Energy and Efficiency: An Economic Perspective - page 97

Regarding the industrial sector, the most common information instrument is
energy audits. Some governments perform free-of-charge energy audits for a group
of industries with the objective to spread the results among the correspondent
industrial branch, while others simply help in partly

nancing energy audits.
Finally, as noted in the previous section, some governments and regulatory
commissions are also approving speci c legislation to guarantee the introduction of

other innovative informational mechanisms that have been found to achieve some
energy savings in the residential sector. In particular, these mechanisms consist of
smart meters that help consumers to know their own consumption in real time, and
billing information that includes a comparative analysis of their own consumption
with that of a similar consumer. In particular, billing information uses social norms
to change the habits or behavior of consumers towards more energy-responsible
patterns [ 69 ]. The following section shows some examples of this approach.

4 Evaluating the Effects of Policies

In this section we present some of the key ndings relating to the effectiveness of

the different policies described above. Given that a number of them have only
recently been introduced it is not possible to undertake a comprehensive ex post
assessment and the jury is still out as to how effective they are. In such cases we can
only comment on issues relating to the implementation of the programs and on
some surveys that have been conducted during implementation.

4.1 Codes and Standards

Since codes and standards have been applied for many years, the market has already
generated a suf cient amount of data that allows analysts to evaluate these policies

ex post, using real data.
In the case of transport, the data show that despite the improvements on fuel
consumption levels due to standards, nal energy consumption from transport

sector has continued growing due to an increase of the size of vehicles that have
outweighed the previous effect [ 78 ]. The rebound effect is thus particularly
important here and estimates indicate that a 100 % increase in energy ef

ciency can
result in an increase of about 22 % in energy demand [ 71 ]. Other authors such as
Frondel et al. [ 28 ] 60 % range.

In the residential sector the evidence of such an effect is much less clear.
Aroonruengsawat et al. [ 4 ] found that those states in the US that had adopted
building codes before an increase in construction had reduced their per capita
electricity consumption from 0.3 to 5 % in 2006. Other studies

nd even higher rebounds, in the 50

-

nd mixed evidence
on the effectiveness of the measures in terms of reductions in energy [ 71 ].
While several studies measure this rebound effect very few carry out a cost
effectiveness analysis of the codes and measures that improve ef

ciency: how much