The European Commission has adopted the most encompassing amendment of the energy statistics regulation ever conducted, aiming is to support the European Green Deal. This amendment, which will enter into force in February, will provide statistics to monitor a number of policy initiatives to decarbonise the European economy, including the Energy Union and the Fit for 55 package, as well as the Hydrogen Strategy and the Initiative on Batteries. The new statistics will be first available for the year 2022, which means it will be published starting no earlier than June 2023.

Eurostat also announced that annual data will become available one month earlier (in October of the following year, instead of November). Estimated energy balances will be published 6 months after the year-end based on official data from Member States, to support the analysis of the first trends of the EU energy market.

Eurostat will publish new and more detailed high-quality data on:

• New energy carriers, such as hydrogen, which will play a key role in sectors that are difficult to decarbonise (such as maritime and air transport). These new statistics will differentiate green hydrogen (produced from renewable energy) from hydrogen produced from oil or gas, and will include data to monitor how hydrogen is used in the EU economy
• Decentralised production of electricity, to monitor small producers such as households/firms installing their own solar PV panels on their roofs or agriculture/forestry companies producing their own electricity from biomass or biogas
• Large-scale batteries, which will become essential to store electricity and stabilise future smart-grids with a high penetration of renewables (as wind or solar production is variable and its output cannot be fine-tuned to meet demand)
• Additional renewable fuels – for example, detailed characteristics of heat pumps and closer monitoring of solar photovoltaic (PV) production, identifying rooftop PV systems, classifying production according to the size of PV system installations and collecting data on off-grid PV systems
• Newly installed and decommissioned electrical capacities to monitor the transformation of the EU power production sector, as carbon-intensive power plants (e.g. coal) are being closed down and replaced with renewable power plants (such as solar PV systems or wind)
• The non-energy use of renewables to replace carbon-intensive materials with new and sustainable bio-based products, such as bio-chemicals, bio-lubricants for the automotive industry or bio-asphalt for our roads
• Breakdown of final energy consumption in: the services sector, providing details on the energy consumption in sectors such as education, wholesale and retail trade, accommodation, food services, hospital activities and many others; for transport activities in rail (identifying metro and tram, high-speed and conventional rail, freight transport and passenger transport) and in road (heavy-duty vehicles, collective transport, and car and vans)
• The energy consumption in data centres, which is increasing sharply and is essential to monitor in order to understand the environmental impact of the digital economy
• Specific final energy consumption in agriculture and in forestry
• Specific data on grid losses during transmission and distribution of gas and electricity, a first step to improving grid efficiency