Strategic Choices for Sustainability at EU Regional Level - The Sustainability of Renewable Energy in Europe - page 86

widespread evolution is necessary. To achieve the objectives of energy security
and emission reduction, smart grid technologies have attracted a lot of interest
and the development of smart grids is becoming a priority of energy policy for
the EU (Giordano et al. 2012 ).
The chapter proceeds as follows: Section 4.1 provides a description of RES al-
location plans for EU countries. Section 4.2 describes where EU stands in the diffu-
sion of RES technologies. Section 4.3 provides an overview of research activities in
place to improve RES' productivity and Sect. 4.4 sets out to define smart grids and
their penetration in Europe. Section 4.5 concludes the chapter.

4.1 Renewable Energy Action Plans in EU Countries

The Directive 2009/28/EC on the promotion of the use of energy from RES, which
is also part of the climate and energy package, sets the overall policy framework in
order to ensure coverage of 20 % of the energy demand of the EU through RES. The
Directive 2009/28/EC also referred to as “indicative trajectory” that EU member
states must follow to ensure that national targets are achieved (European Commis-
sion 2009a ). The key instrument is the adoption of a National Renewable Energy
Action Plan (NREAP) that is a planning document that provides detailed guidance
on the actions to be implemented to achieve, from June 2010 until 2020, the bind-
ing objectives for all EU countries. The target is not equally divided between the
EU member states, but each has an individual target for the overall share of RES in
energy consumption. The objectives are to be achieved through the use of energy
from RES in the electricity, heating-cooling, and transport sectors. It follows an
analysis of the NREAP of all EU countries.

Austria The Austrian NREAP divides the target of 34 % RES into 70.6 % renew-
able electricity, 32.6 % in heating and cooling, and 11.4 % RES in transport. The
projections of RES electricity mainly involve a relatively large use of hydro, fol-
lowed by wind onshore, biomass, and pumping. As for the heating and cooling sec-
tor, the goal of 32.6 % in 2020 is achieved by 28.1 % from biomass, 2.1 % from solar
thermal, and 0.3 % from geothermal. The objective of 11.4 % RES in the transport
sector is achieved through employing 80 ktoe of bioethanol, biodiesel 410 ktoe, and
272 ktoe of RES electricity and 94 from other sources.

Belgium The Belgian NREAP divides the target of 13 % RES in 20.9 % renew-
able electricity, 11.9 % in heating and cooling, and 10.1 % RES in transport. The
NREAP plan to achieve the mandatory target of 13 % RES by RES technologies
that will produce approximately 5374.4 ktoe in 2020. The Belgian RES Federation,
European development opportunities in rural area (EDORA), estimates that a target
of 5985 ktoe (10 % more than the target NREAP) is economically achievable and is
feasible. As for the heating and cooling and transports sector, the objectives of the
NREAP and EDORA are quite similar, the predictions are much more ambitious
for the electricity sector, according to which EDORA expects 26.6 % of renew-