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Sound evaluation needs sound numbers. But measuring energy savings is measuring something that is not used and can meet unexpected difficulties. The European Commission has made strong efforts to harmonize methods to measure energy efficiency and energy savings and to monitor the progress towards the goals of the Energy Efficiency Directive. However, in practice, multiple methods are still used, which may lead to confusion. In this paper, we use the Netherlands as a case study to analyze this phenomenon. In the Netherlands, three national indicators on energy efficiency exist, next to a European indicator next to the impact of individual policy instruments. The large differences and sometimes contradictory results of the different indicators lead to questions about what is the "best" method. This paper studies the reasons behind the differences between the methods used for industrial energy efficiency improvement in the Netherlands. It compares detailed bottom-up data from individual policy instruments with top-down national figures. We disentangle the impact of volume, efficiency, and structure effects. In this way, we visualize the differences between several methods and the impact of the choice of metrics used in those methods. This helps understanding why care should be taken when comparing industrial energy efficiency results from different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonenergy use is the consumption of fossil fuels as feedstocks for the manufacture of synthetic materials, e.g. plastics. Nonenergy partly leads to short-term carbon dioxide emissions and partly, it is stored in products for longer periods of time. The IPCC guidelines (Reference Approach) offer a top-down method to estimate the amount of stored carbon. An alternative method is material flow analysis, a bottom-up calculation method. A prerequisite for the application of both methods is that nonenergy use data published in national energy balancescomply with a common definition. We found that this is not always the case and that the resulting errors can be considerable, i.e. approx. 10% for Germany and 30% for Italy. Therefore, we performed a harmonization step for nonenergy data. We then applied the IPCC method and material flow analysis to Germany. One result is that the material-flow analysis confirms the outcome according to the IPCC Reference Approach. Another result is that total carbon losses equal about 10% of nonenergy use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]