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The decarbonisation of the building sector is crucial for Portugal's goal of achieving economy-wide carbon neutrality by 2050. To mobilize communities towards energy efficiency measures, it is important to understand the primary drivers and barriers that must be overcome through policymaking. This paper aims to review existing Energy Policies and Actions (EPA) in Portugal and assess their effectiveness in improving Energy Efficiency (EE) and reducing CO2 emissions in the building sector. The Local Energy Planning Assistant (LEPA) tool was used to model, test, validate and compare the implementation of current and alternative EPAs in the North of Portugal, including the national EE plan. The results indicate that electrification of heating and cooling, EE measures, and the proliferation of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) are crucial for achieving climate neutrality. The study found that the modelling of alternative EPAs can be improved to reduce investment costs and increase Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions reduction. Among the alternatives assessed, the proposed one (Alternative 4) presents the best returns on investment in terms of cost savings and emissions reduction. It allows for 52% investment cost savings in the residential sector and 13% in the service sector when compared to the current national roadmap to carbon neutrality (Alternative 2). The estimated emission reduction in 2050 for Alternative 4 is 0.64% for the residential sector and 3.2% for the service sector when compared to Alternative 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transport sector accounts for around one-quarter of the GHG emissions in Europe, and, in Portugal, it represents almost one-third of the total emissions to the atmosphere. Unfortunately, these emissions have increased in recent years. Hence, cities and countries need plans to decarbonize their public transport fleets, and, more specifically, to replace fossil-fueled buses with electric buses that produce zero CO2 emissions. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to present a method to decarbonize the bus fleet in Portugal by a scheduled replacement of the current fleet, which is fueled by fossil fuels, with a completely electric fleet, in fourteen years. The study shows that it is possible to replace all Portuguese urban bus fleets with electric vehicles considering that all vehicles will be replaced when reaching the age of 14 years. Replacing the urban bus fleet with zero-emission buses would aid policymakers and bus companies to reduce the GHGs, and therefore contribute to fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, namely, Goal 13—take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change already affects all inhabited regions of the world, with human influence contributing to many observed changes in climate extremes and to mitigate this trend, important decisions have been taken by different world organizations and countries to achieve global net-zero emissions. At the European Union level (EU27 countries), two of the main pillars for achieving carbon neutrality are: (1) The "Energy Efficiency First principle" in the formulation of energy policy and in taking relevant investment decisions and (2) the electrification of the energy sector, supported by generating electricity through endogenous renewable energy sources. In this context, a comprehensive review was carried out on what has been developed by the scientific community and main international energy organizations on the electrification of the energy sector. Additionally, with the purpose of better understanding the state of the art of a country regarding the decarbonization process, the Portuguese energy vectors were identified in terms of which ones can and should be electrified by 2050, based on the data available from Eurostat (2019). Portugal is a country highly dependent on imported energy (78%), where the largest energy vector is from oil and petroleum products (68%) mostly used in the transport sector, where the electrification of the sector will be increased gradually until 2050. However, other decarbonized solutions, such as biofuels and synthetic (green) fuels cannot be ruled out and should be the subject of future work and considered for the decarbonization goals to be achieved in 2050. The main conclusions reflect that there is still a long way to go, much like the rest of the world, as it is necessary to electrify the equivalent to almost all the energy presently imported by Portugal, a tough challenge considering the need for its generation to be decarbonized. In this context, energy efficiency must play an equivalently important role to significantly reduce current energy demand, leading to more cost-effective and resilient energy services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]