
The Institute for Impact Assessment and Scientific Evaluation of Policy and Legislation

Study on the European Commission Impact Assessments on Renewable Energy and on Bioenergy
19th June 2017
Today the IAI is publishing its study scrutinising the Impact Assessment accompanying the European Commission legislative proposal:
“Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources” SWD (2016) 418
including the IMPACT ASSESSMENT on “Sustainability of Bioenergy”
and on
the coherence between the Impact Assessments and the legislative proposal COM (767) 2016
published on 30th November 2016.
The study, authored by Erik Akse, Fiona Dubernet, Simon Godwin and Julie Lenoir, identifies a number of significant shortcomings in the transparency of evidence, the underlying assumptions and the technical analysis. It also finds that the legislative proposal includes provisions not fully supported by evidence and in some cases in inconsistent with the Impact Assessments without full explanation of the reasoning.
As part of the Institute's standard peer review process, scientific and factual comments on the content of the study are invited from any stakeholder at any time to inform a potential revision.
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Stakeholder review and version control
On 22nd May a draft version of the study was distributed to the European Commission, Members of the European Parliament involved in the legislative negotiations and interested expert stakeholders from industry and civil society.
Responses were received from two NGOs and one industry association. Changes were made subsequent to this feedback. A version showing tracked changes between the final version and the draft is available for download below