Productivity impact from multiple impact perspective

Full economic assessment taking all the costs and benefits is required to enable the potential of any energy policy. However, today these assessments are often exclude important factors such as co-benefits/multiple impacts of any energy policy. The inclusion of additional impact into decision-making analysis may influence any policy maker to design a policy portfolio. Most of the time, multiple impacts of energy efficiency policy are not incorporated into ex-ante policy analysis due to the absence of mature methodologies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive methodological framework which addresses the key challenges to incorporate multiple impacts especially productivity impact into a decision-making framework.

This study first talks about the importance of incorporating multiple impacts of energy efficiency measures into decision-making framework by taking productivity impact as an example and then it identifies the key methodological gap of multiple impacts especially productivity impact accounting. Lastly, it proposes a framework to quantify and monetize productivity impact in a systematic manner.

This paper contributes to the methodological toolbox by proposing the solutions to the key methodological challenges of aggregation of multiple impacts by taking productivity impact as an example. This study proposes a systematic and analytical framework which addresses key challenges such as double counting, additionality, baseline, context dependency and distributional effect to evaluate productivity impact.

This paper is an output of Calculating and Operationalising the Multiple Benefits of Energy Efficiency in Europe (COMBI) project. COMBI project is a part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.