cae-certification-system-accreditations
The Spanish market now has accredited bodies for verifying the energy savings certificate system
ENAC has granted OCA Instituto de Certificación, European Quality Assurance Spain (EQA), AENOR Confía, LGAI Technological Center, Bureau Veritas Iberia and SGS Tecnos the first accreditations as verifiers for the Energy Savings Certificate System (Certificados de Ahorro Energético, CAE), in accordance with the Royal Decree 36/2023 provisions, establishing the aforementioned system, and Order TED/815/2023, which develops the specific inspection requirements in this area and which requires these assessors to be accredited. With this, the Spanish market will now have the necessary accredited services for implementing this public energy saving mechanism.
The CAE System is included in the framework of the National System of Energy Efficiency Obligations (Sistema Nacional de Obligaciones de Eficiencia Energética, SNOEE) as an additional mechanism developed for achieving the EU energy saving targets commitments for the period 2021-2030 and beyond in a flexible and effective way. It offers an alternative to SNOEE obligated bodies as they will be able to meet part of their annual final energy savings obligations through the CAE settlement. This way, the CAE must reflect the annual energy consumption savings resulting from investments made in energy efficiency actions. These must comply with the principles and methodology for calculating energy savings established in Directive 2012/27/EU and in Commission Recommendation (EU) 2019/1658.
With all this, this system aims to promote, throughout the national territory, an economy that uses energy resources more efficiently, so becoming more competitive.
Within the system, the energy saving verifier is key, as they are in charge of proving that the documentation submitted by the obliged bodies, the obliged companies or their delegates to evidence the energy savings achieved on the energy savings obtained by the execution of one or more energy efficiency actions, is in accordance with the regulations and that the declared savings are true in order to determine if they are in a position to obtain the CAE.
For this reason, having a rigorous and reliable verification process is vital for ensuring that the system achieves the intended objectives and this is the reason why the Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (Ministerio para la Transición Ecológica y el Reto Demográfico, MITERD) has established the accreditation requirement for verifiers.
The accreditation scheme
The verifiers accreditation within the CAE system is regulated by the corresponding accreditation scheme prepared by ENAC, following the guidelines set by the MITERD, Directorate General for Energy Policy and Mines, that takes the UNE-EN ISO/IEC 17029:2019 and UNE-EN ISO/IEC 14065:2020 standards as a reference and which is described in the ENAC RDE-33 document.
This document sets out that accreditation may be granted at two levels: the first level for energy savings verifier accreditation resulting from standardized actions (those which, due to their characteristics and technical particularities, can be easily replicated) and the second level for energy savings verifiers accreditation resulting from singular actions (those which, due to their characteristics and technical particularities, cannot be included in a file of the catalogue of standardized actions).
Regarding this, in relation to the now-granted accreditations, OCA Global, AENOR Confía, LGAI Technological Center and Bureau Veritas Iberia have been accredited for standardized actions, and EQA and SGS Tecnos for standardized and unique actions.
For more information, please contact Edelio Gago, head of ENAC's Certification and Verification Department.
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