Energy Efficiency

The M-Benefits project reveals that energy efficiency investments often overlook crucial benefits like product quality, operational risk reduction, and competitiveness. This gap persists despite clear profitability, as conventional appraisal methods focus narrowly on energy savings. The project provides tools, training, and case studies to help professionals communicate and leverage a project's full value, urging a shift to encompass strategic business outcomes, beyond mere technical improvements.

DEESME project enhances EU energy management via collaboration, clear communications and focusing on multiple benefits, addressing challenges SMEs face in compliance, audit quality, and recognizing wider advantages of energy efficiency beyond savings.

The DEESME project aims to simplify energy efficiency for European SMEs by providing practical national scheme recommendations that are user-centered, highlighting benefits, and making policy guidelines clear and accessible, alongside incentivizing benchmarking and carbon footprint tracking.

The DEESME project demonstrates how SMEs across Europe benefit from integrated energy audits by achieving energy savings and unlocking multiple business advantages, such as enhanced innovation, employee satisfaction, and resilience.

The DEESME Multiple Benefits Approach transforms energy audits for SMEs into a strategic business improvement tool, emphasizing productivity, sustainability, and employee wellbeing, beyond mere compliance. This innovative method fosters holistic benefits and equips future leaders to drive the energy transition.

The DEESME project promotes a Multiple Benefit approach, integrating energy efficiency with broader business goals in SMEs, aligning with EU sustainability policy and enhancing various non-energy aspects, such as safety and product quality.

Despite representing a significant portion of Europe's energy demand, most SMEs face challenges in adopting energy efficiency measures due to financial constraints, lack of knowledge, time pressures, and cultural inertia. However, research from seven European projects suggests that targeted training, energy audits, and collaboration can overcome these barriers, with the potential for substantial savings and competitiveness enhancements.

The DEESME project promotes a Multiple Benefits Approach to energy auditing, integrating energy efficiency with broader business strategies for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), aiming to generate value across various organizational aspects, thus transforming compliance into strategic opportunity.

The M-Benefits research across 23 pilots identified 251 non-energy benefits (NEBs) of energy efficiency, quantifiable in 58% of cases, markedly increasing average internal rate of return and shortening payback periods, thereby underscoring their strategic business significance.