For Europe to be able to compete with other regions of the world and position European industry at the forefront, CEN and CENELEC aim to lead European and international standardization work – and bring together all relevant stakeholders to define and agree on common solutions to address present and future energy challenges. Standardization plays an important role in meeting EU targets by promoting best practices, improving energy efficiency and safety, and providing tools to optimize installations and systems.
The REPowerEU Plan (the focus of which is on saving energy, producing clean energy, and diversifying energy supplies) put in place by the European Commission is a response to global energy market disruptions experienced in recent years. New geopolitical and energy market realities require the EU to drastically accelerate the clean energy transition and increase Europe's energy independence.
European Standards are critical to ensuring the safety and security of electrical installations, facilitating supply chain security, interoperability, enabling investments in the electricity network, saving costs, and speeding up deployment and modernization as a result. The transition to an all-electric society is often seen as a key component of efforts to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By relying on electricity generated from renewable sources, such as solar and wind power, societies can reduce their carbon footprint and move towards more sustainable and environmentally friendly energy systems.
The core principle and responsibility of the nuclear industry is to guarantee its safety and security. For this reason, CEN and CENELEC Technical Committees (TCs), in close collaboration with international standardization organizations ISO and IEC, publish European standards that ensure safety and security. Environmental and technical requirements support the European nuclear energy industry to produce carbon-free energy to face the challenges of climate change.
Last but not least, European standards help to make home appliances, devices, and infrastructures more energy-efficient, define ways to reuse and recycle waste, and set incentives for products to be more sustainable (including by setting requirements for product quality, transparency, but also for production, design, and processing methods that meet the needs of the present without compromising the future).
In this context, today there are more than 60 CEN and CENELEC TCs working to some extent on the energy sector. The standards they develop play a unique role: they support EU policy objectives and provide stakeholders with clear, up-to-date, and market-oriented guidance that is based on the consensus of a wide array of experts coming from all around Europe, with different backgrounds. This is what makes standards one of the most efficient tools to support the journey towards the digitalization and sustainability of the energy sector.
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