During the last General Assembly the ESTIF Work Plan for 2017 was discussed.

The priorities look into the main actions for which ESTIF can play a significant role, either having a medium to long term impact or a short to medium term impact in the sector.

On the medium to long term, the main topic is to position solar heating and cooling in the future energy mix. This need for positioning implies an understanding of the what the future energy system could look like and how solar heating and cooling can be competitive and well integrated in such scenarios.

This positioning shall serve to promote solar thermal at a political level, providing more than an understanding of what is the technology today. Mainly it shall help policy makers, at European and national level, to understand that solar thermal has a role to play in the long term and as such it is important to keep investing in it, either in research and innovation either in creating conditions that can promote a stronger market uptake.

Such understanding will be an important condition assisting the advocacy work that will be done with regard to the Clean Energy Package, launched by the European Commission at the end of 2016 and that will dominate the policy agenda in 2017, namely in the European Parliament.

Regarding the short term impact priorities, ESTIF work shall address the implementation of the previous RES-Directive and the need come much closer to the indicative national 2020 targets for solar thermal, namely taking into account the proposals of the Heating and Cooling Strategy. One important issues will also to clarify the impact of wild electrification of heating.

The questions regarding labelling shall also be one of the priorities for ESTIF work. Labelling will not focus only on the energy labelling and eco-design process but also on the reinforcement and improvement of Solar Keymark, and the related work in the scope of standardisation.

Finally, ESTIF shall grow its membership base, increase the interaction with members and improve the servicing to members. Growing the membership base is important at different levels. One obvious one is the increase of financial resources and providing increased capacity in the secretariat to pursue the work needed by the sector. But it is also important in order to increase the representativeness of the organisation and increase the expertise base in which discussions are grounded. Increasing the interaction with members is part of the same process, keeping members informed of essential issues but also being able to collect inputs. The idea of better servicing stems from the need to increase the value members attribute to ESTIF membership, helping to retain members but also to become more attractive to other companies. This includes also improving ESTIF image and notoriety, including revising the image and developing a new website, more modern appealing and functional.

For more information, please consult the full document here or contact the ESTIF secretariat at members(at)estif.org.