Local Energy Transition

With the national Climate Agreement in place, it’s now up to municipalities to organise the heat transition in homes and other buildings and designate sites for wind and solar. CE Delft provides research and consulting services to help with design of local climate and sustainability policies and assess their effectiveness.

With our in-depth knowledge of policies and the policy cycle and our extensive know-how on technical and economic aspects of the energy transition, we can suggest policies best in line with municipal targets, if necessary calling in colleagues working on other themes like Sustainable Urban Mobility and Sustainable Procurement.

Key fields of expertise

  • Regional Energy Strategies (RES)
  • Heat transition visions
  • Connecting models with policy

Financial Instruments

We support our clients in the evaluation and design of policies in the realm of green taxation, energy subsidies, vehicle taxes, CO2 charges, biodiversity offsets (‘habitat banking’), funding instruments for nature and the environment and so on. Financial instruments are now part and parcel of modern climate and environmental policy.

Our strength lies in combining economic expertise with new insights from environmental and energy technologies, allowing integrated assessments of how policies play out in technical as well as behavioural terms. We deliver both ex-post policy reviews evaluating efficacy and cost-effectiveness and ex-ante advice on policy design. Thanks to our combined technical and economic expertise, we’re are also regularly asked by government departments for input on proposed new climate policy, as with the Dutch government’s response to the Urgenda court case and Green Deal measures in pursuit of the new national 55% CO2 reduction target for 2030.

CE Delft has built up a solid reputation as a source of independent advice on financial instruments. By joining forces with our technical experts working on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), energy and transport we can rapidly get a handle on what works and what doestn’t, and can benefit from the latest technical understanding. In our work on this theme we use both standard and in-house assessment methods, economic models (E3ME, input-output tables, Merge, WorldScan), climate policy cost curves and extensive databases on the elasticities of energy use and environmental behaviour.

Sustainable Heat

Slowly but surely the transitioning of the built environment is starting to take shape. By the end of 2021 all Dutch municipalities are to have finalised a Heat Transition Vision and started rolling out Neighbourhood Implementation Plans. CE Delft supports municipalities, housing corporations, grid operators and other stakeholders in these processes.

When it comes to sustainable heat, CE Delft delivers research and consulting services on the available options, from individual buildings to entire neighbourhoods, from private to collective, from technologies to costs and policies. Particularly important in this area: CE Delft’s consultants have a good feel for the political and social forces playing out at the municipal level.

For many years now we’ve been providing support on complex heating issues in the built environment and greenhouse horticulture, on zero-gas heating systems and the transition to green, climate-neutral alternatives. We’re well-versed in all the technical options for reducing heat demand (improving energy efficiency) and meeting the remaining demand with heat pumps, heat grids, hybrid variants, green gases and many other innovations.