Government cuts to key policies have hit the UK’s efforts to become more energy efficient, a new report says.

A series of policy rollbacks have seen the UK fall from first to sixth in a ranking of 16 of the world’s leading economies by US thinktank the American Council for an Energy Efficient-Economy (ACEEE). Germany now tops the list, with Italy, China, and France all coming in ahead of the UK.

ACEEE awarded each country points based on 31 criteria. Countries could receive a maximum of 100 points overall depending on the strength of their national energy efficiency policies, and efforts to curb energy use in the transport, buildings and industrial sectors. See this table for a full list of the criteria.

Source: ACEEE,  2014 International Energy Efficiency Scorecard

About half ACEEE’s criteria were actually quantifiable – taking into account a change in a country’s energy intensity or the number of miles each country’s citizens travel by car. The rest were more dependent on ACEEE’s researchers’ judgements about how well country’s energy efficiency programmes were progressing. So the scores and rankings should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.

Nonetheless, ACEEE’s analysis does give some insight into a range of comparable countries’ efforts to curb energy consumption.

UK policies

The UK government’s stalled efforts to improve residential energy efficiency and curb industrial energy use were seen as the country’s main failures since ACEEE’s last report.

The UK scored well on national efforts – getting 18 points out of 25 – as it spends a lot on researching energy efficient technologies, and participates in a range of EU schemes to curb energy use. ACEEE were less impressed with the UK’s sector-specific efforts to improve energy efficiency, however.

Source: ACEEE, 2014 International Energy Efficiency Scorecard

The government’s flagship policy to improve the energy efficiency of UK homes, the Green Deal, has been less effective than was anticipated back in 2012, ACEEE says.

2,828 homes made home improvements via the Green Deal by the end of May, government statistics show. That’s a long way short of the government’s ambition – former climate minister Greg Barker said he would struggle to sleep if 10,000 homes hadn’t taken up the offer by the end of last year.

The government also weakened a policy requiring energy suppliers to subsidise home insulation for low-income households. Last December, ministers agreed to give suppliers four years rather than two to achieve their Energy Company Obligation targets. The cut means the number of homes insulated under government energy efficiency programmes could fall from 80,000 in 2012 to 25,000 in 2014, according to UK industry group the Association for the Conservation of Energy (ACE).

The UK needs to do more to curb industrial energy use, ACEEE says. The energy intensity of the UK’s industrial sector – measured in terms of how much energy is consumed for each dollar of GDP generated – is relatively high, at almost three British Thermal Units per dollar. In top-ranked Germany, it’s closer to two.

ACEEE recommends two policies that could lead to improvements: forcing companies to employ personnel to specifically identify how energy can be used more efficiently, and requiring industries to undertake periodic reviews of their energy use. Both measures would help the private sector take the lead on identifying areas where efficiency improvements could be made. A number of other countries including Russia, China and Italy already make such demands, ACEEE points out.

So the UK isn’t doing as well in the energy efficiency stakes as it once was, according to ACEEE’s criteria. Though predicting how recent changes to the UK’s energy policy will pan out is notoriously difficult, as network operator National Grid pointed out last week.

European direction

The UK could potentially be forced to reverse the trend ACEEE identifies by a European Commission announcement on Wednesday.

The European Commission’s president-elect, Jean Claude Juncker, is set to go head to head with current president Jose Manuel Barroso over the level of new EU energy efficiency targets. Juncker has called for minimum improvement of 30 per cent. Barroso favours a target of between 27 and 29 per cent.

The higher the EU target is, the more the UK is likely to need to do to curb energy use. That could mean stepping up efforts to improve the UK’s energy efficiency across sectors, rather than rolling back its previous commitments.