JRC-IDEES-2021

The Joint Research Centre's Integrated Database of the European Energy System (JRC-IDEES) incorporates in a single database a rich set of information allowing for highly granular analyses of the dynamics of the European energy system, so as to better understand the past and create a robust basis for future policy assessments. JRC-IDEES provides a consistent set of disaggregated energy-economy-emissions data for each Member State of the European Union, covering all sectors of the energy system for the 2000-2021 period. This data complies with Eurostat energy balances while providing a plausible decomposition of energy consumption into specific processes and end uses. In each sector, JRC-IDEES uses a vintage-specific approach to quantify the characteristics of the energy-using equipment in operation, along with the average operation of the equipment stock. It accordingly identifies different drivers and provides insights on their role by sector while accounting for structural differences across countries. As such, JRC-IDEES has several key applications for energy system modelling, research, and policy analysis, such as the parameterization of energy models and the assessment of past and prospective policies.

JRC-IDEES is freely accessible to the general public since 2018. This report documents the 2024 update (JRC-IDEES-2021), which is available through the JRC Data Catalogue and introduces a number of methodological refinements while extending the time coverage until 2021.

This article describes the features and typical application of the latest release of the Joint Research Centre's Integrated Database of the European Energy System (JRC-IDEES-2021). JRC-IDEES is an analytical database that harmonizes statistics of the EU energy system and provides highly disaggregated indicators at the level of each individual end use of energy, reporting annual data for 2000–2021 and each EU country. The database is thus suitable to analyse historical EU trends and to serve as input for EU energy modelling or policy analysis. This article focuses on JRC-IDEES’ transport sector database, which covers energy intensities, vehicle sales, vehicle stock, activity and operational data for all fuel/powertrain technologies across all passenger and freight transport modes. The resulting level of resolution exceeds existing primary statistics, while ensuring consistency across indicators and drawing on extensive data sources to provide a technically plausible picture of the evolution of individual modes and technologies. The article first describes the key data sources and calibration methodology used to produce the JRC-IDEES transport dataset. The resulting disaggregated indicators are then contrasted with the sparser breakdown available from Eurostat, revealing recent EU-level trends in the energy use of passenger cars and heavy goods vehicles that would have been masked by aggregate primary statistics. A clustering analysis further explores country-level historical patterns for 2000–2019 and highlights the mode-specific impact of alternative fuel adoption on the share of fossil fuels in road transport, illustrating insights that can be gained by coupling JRC-IDEES’ granular data with advanced data analysis methods.

The climate targets of the European Union (EU) are defined in relation to historical benchmarks: for instance, the European Climate Law requires net domestic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to be reduced by at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990. However, for aviation and maritime transport, primary statistics on emissions are not available at the level of geographical detail needed to suitably track the contribution of international voyages to domestic emissions. To this end, this report describes a calibration methodology that harmonizes available statistics and yields an

internally-consistent decomposition of 1990-2021 activity, energy use, and emissions for aviation and maritime transport in the EU and European Economic Area (EEA). The resulting dataset matches Eurostat energy balances and distinguishes intra-/extra-EU and/or intra-/extra-EEA departures for each EU Member State, each EEA country, and the United Kingdom. The dataset is therefore consistent with the scope of EU climate policies and can inform further research and decisionmaking. The dataset is included in the latest release of the Joint Research Centre's Integrated Database of the European Energy System (JRC-IDEES-2021), which is freely accessible through the JRC Data Catalogue under an open-access license.