Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition
Jun 30, 2026 · 53 min · 10 segments
EUSEW turns 20. To mark it, Marine Cornelis sits down at the European Sustainable Energy Week with three people who have spent two decades inside EU energy policy: Thomas Nowak (heat pumps and…
is there like is there any kind of policy moment in the past 20 years so we saw that he has changed a lot from really the very first architecture the first energy packages and so on to uh the energy union the green deal we borrow you etc where has there been some moments uh in the past 20 years that you ex kind of expected to be a little bit more exciting and weren't um Perhaps.
On the exciting part, we have, of course, discussed many different details on energy efficiency.
So I do think that I would have expected energy efficiency on the ground to have a bigger impact, and I think it did not.
And maybe it did not because we allowed all the time to run fossil fuels on the site.
So this lack of dedication on taking a stance in favor of the most efficient solution, which is electrification, that was, in my view, disappointing.
in the, let's say, 2010s, 12s, when the building efficiency directives came and eco-design.
And at the same time, maybe the upside is now that as soon as we have taken a stance and a decision in favor of electrification, and we say, let's set an electrification target, and we get that now, and we start also to document a bit better how little we still have electrified and how much more work we have to do.
And I must mention the primary energy fallacy because it's used so much against the electrification agenda that people say, but we compare primary energy with final energy and then it looks as an insurmountable challenge, but it is not.
And then on the other side, what I think was most impactful, and I hoped it to be, so I'm quite happy that it happened, that was the extension of the whole renewables discussion into heat.
And especially there the recognition that outside air, ambient air, can actually be a very powerful energy carrier.
And because we also have a lot of waste heat from cooling that we expel to the outside, if we would now translate that to the 2020s and say, let's reuse the waste heat from cooling, you know, then we could even put an additional block on the foundation of ambient energy as energy source.
is there like is there any kind of policy moment in the past 20 years so we saw that he has changed a lot from really the very first architecture the first energy packages and so on to uh the energy union the green deal we borrow you etc where has there been some moments uh in the past 20 years that you ex kind of expected to be a little bit more exciting and weren't um Perhaps.
On the exciting part, we have, of course, discussed many different details on energy efficiency.
So I do think that I would have expected energy efficiency on the ground to have a bigger impact, and I think it did not.
And maybe it did not because we allowed all the time to run fossil fuels on the site.
So this lack of dedication on taking a stance in favor of the most efficient solution, which is electrification, that was, in my view, disappointing.
in the, let's say, 2010s, 12s, when the building efficiency directives came and eco-design.
And at the same time, maybe the upside is now that as soon as we have taken a stance and a decision in favor of electrification, and we say, let's set an electrification target, and we get that now, and we start also to document a bit better how little we still have electrified and how much more work we have to do.
And I must mention the primary energy fallacy because it's used so much against the electrification agenda that people say, but we compare primary energy with final energy and then it looks as an insurmountable challenge, but it is not.
And then on the other side, what I think was most impactful, and I hoped it to be, so I'm quite happy that it happened, that was the extension of the whole renewables discussion into heat.
And especially there the recognition that outside air, ambient air, can actually be a very powerful energy carrier.
And because we also have a lot of waste heat from cooling that we expel to the outside, if we would now translate that to the 2020s and say, let's reuse the waste heat from cooling, you know, then we could even put an additional block on the foundation of ambient energy as energy source.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.