The Commission convened an ad hoc Electricity Coordination Group with Member States, ENTSO-E, the Regional Coordination Centres and the Energy Community Secretariat against a backdrop of persistent high temperatures and record low water levels; the Group confirmed that security of supply is stable with no short-term adequacy risks, while the situation is expected to remain tight in the coming weeks. The qualifier "tight" is what merits attention from our community. In a prolonged summer heat event, the balance is shaped not only by available generation but also by the profile of cooling demand across the building stock - a load that is unusually sensitive to envelope performance, shading, system efficiency and control strategy. As the frequency of such episodes increases, the interaction between building services and system adequacy is likely to become a more regular feature of the security-of-supply discussion, and one where HVAC expertise has something concrete to contribute

EU emissions reached 837 million tonnes CO2-eq in Q1 2026, up 0.3% quarter-on-quarter with flat GDP; the sector with the largest increase was electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply (+4.8%), while households fell 1.3% and manufacturing and transport both fell 0.6%. Year-on-year, emissions were down 1.2% while GDP grew 0.8%. The longer-term decoupling from GDP continues, but the quarterly breakdown is worth reading closely from a buildings perspective. The category posting the largest increase is the one that supplies heat, cold and power, while direct household emissions declined - a pattern consistent with progressive electrification and efficiency gains in the residential stock. It suggests that emissions associated with building energy use are increasingly accounted for upstream rather than at the meter, which makes demand-side performance no less relevant to the overall trajectory, only less visible in the household line of the statistics.

The Group confirmed no short-term adequacy risks while flagging a tight situation, with generation reduced in some countries due to low water levels or high water temperatures. High solar generation eased price pressure during central hours of the day, but the Group stressed that storage deployment remains critical so that excess midday generation can serve evening consumption peaks, and noted that voluntary demand-side measures - particularly in Hungary - proved their value under a tight generation-demand balance. This is the clearest institutional endorsement yet of what our sector has been arguing: the midday-solar / evening-peak mismatch is a storage problem, and thermal storage in buildings is the cheapest storage Europe already owns. Heat pumps with DHW tanks, buffer vessels, thermally activated building systems and pre-cooling strategies can absorb solar surplus and release it hours later at near-zero marginal capital cost. REHVA supports the explicit recognition of demand-side flexibility in adequacy assessments, and urges that "storage" in EU electricity policy be read to include thermal storage and flexible HVAC operation, not electrochemical storage alone - provided flexibility is delivered within, not at the expense of, indoor environmental quality requirements

Provisional 2025 data put the renewable share of EU gross final energy consumption at 26.2%, up from 25.2% in 2024, against a 2030 target of 42.5% that would require an average increase of 3.3 percentage points per year from 2026 to 2030. Renewables reached 49.9% of gross electricity consumption, up 2.4 pp. Heating and cooling, however, reached only 27.4%, an increase of 0.7 pp on 2024 and slightly below the 2004–2025 average annual increase of 0.75 pp. The contrast is the story: electricity is close to half renewable and accelerating, while heating and cooling - roughly half of EU final energy demand - is advancing at a rate that has not improved in two decades. At 0.7 pp per year the sector will not close the gap to the RED III trajectory, and the aggregate 3.3 pp annual requirement is arithmetically unreachable without a step change here. REHVA's stance is unchanged and now unambiguously supported by the data: decarbonisation of heating and cooling is the binding constraint on the 2030 target. Delivering it requires accelerated heat pump and renewable district heating and cooling deployment, EPBD implementation that pairs renovation with system-level design, and - the point most often missed in national planning - enough qualified HVAC engineers and installers to specify, commission and maintain the installed base. Technology availability is not the bottleneck; design quality, commissioning and skills are.

REHVA Brussels Summit 2026 — HVAC pathway to energy security
Thursday, 19 November 2026 — European Economic and Social Committee, Brussels

REHVA will hold its 2026 Brussels Summit on 19 November at the European Economic and Social Committee, renewing a partnership whose focus on connecting organised civil society with the EU institutions matches REHVA's own approach to evidence-based dialogue.

The timing is deliberate. The EPBD transposition deadline passed on 29 May 2026 for substantially all provisions, and Member States are finalising their National Building Renovation Plans by the end of the year — moving the debate from legislative design to delivery and measurable results. In parallel, the Commission's Heating and Cooling Strategy, developed under the Action Plan for Affordable Energy, places a segment that accounts for around half of EU energy demand and remains some 70% fossil-fuel based at the centre of the Union's energy security, affordability and competitiveness agenda.

The Policy Conference moves deliberately from the technical to the political to the practical, each session taking a distinct vantage point.

Session I — EPBD implementation: Member State reporting and discussion. A bottom-up technical assessment of where transposition actually stands. After an institutional keynote from the Commission and the European Parliament on the state of play and enforcement priorities, the core of the session presents REHVA's EPBD implementation reporting from Member States. Drawing on our network of national member associations, the exercise maps how ZEB requirements, minimum energy performance standards for the worst-performing buildings, IEQ provisions, solar-readiness obligations and renovation passports are being translated into national codes and methodologies, identifying divergences, gaps and good practices that can guide late-moving Member States. An extended Q&A opens the findings to scrutiny by national experts, industry and policymakers.

Session II — The EED and the EU Heating and Cooling Strategy. A top-down view of the policy architecture shaping the next phase, tempered by the local heating and cooling plans through which the EED is delivered in practice. A Commission keynote will set out the Strategy's objectives — clean and efficient heating and cooling, integrated infrastructure planning, district energy, waste heat recovery — followed by a keynote presenting REHVA's vision and the HVAC sector's perspective. The panel will address how the Strategy translates into market signals: restoring momentum in the heat pump market, mobilising the installer workforce, the electricity-to-gas price ratio, and ensuring efficiency delivers lower bills as well as lower emissions.

Session III — From policy to practice: delivering renovation projects across Europe. Sponsored by the Horizon Europe project InCUBE (23 partners, seven countries), this closing session presents three industrialised renovation case studies: Trento, on decarbonising district energy supply through ground-source heat pumps and renewable energy community models; Groningen, on how prefabrication, robotics and automation compress renovation timelines and costs; and Zaragoza, on participatory renovation of an occupied residential building delivered with owners at home and strong attention to social inclusion and affordability.

Members and supporters will find the Summit a direct opportunity to test the EU-level framework against national implementation evidence and delivered projects. Registration details and the full programme will follow in the coming weeks.