The EUropean MOtor REnovation initiative (EU-MORE), co-funded under a LIFE grant agreement, aims to accelerate the replacement rate of old, inefficient motors through the development of new policies. Organisations tend to operate electric motors for much longer than their intended lifetime and typically replace them only when they reach their operational end-of-life. This has significant energy efficiency implications. Through swift action, the replacement rate of old motors by high-efficient ones can be raised significantly.

EU-MORE has conducted a review of existing policies in EU member states that directly or indirectly aim at accelerating motor replacement. A total of 61 policy measures have been identified and analysed for their approach, impact and lessons learnt, leading to an initial set of general observations. These observations will be used to derive policy recommendations.

A first observation is the uneven geographical distribution of the identified measures and their impact. While countries like Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Poland manage to achieve a relatively substantial impact, other major European economies like Italy, France and Spain have implemented few policies to enhance the replacement rates of motors. A second observation is that support systems of a financial kind, including subsidies, loans and fiscal compensations, comprise the large majority of all policy measures. The lack of information is a major barrier that is much less addressed by existing policy measures. Even when energy efficiency audits do identify motor replacement as a potential action, there are still many barriers to overcome.

Finally, the large majority of the policy measures target industry, while service companies, municipalities and buildings are much less aimed at.

This paper discusses the analysis of existing policy measures in detail and shine light on policy recommendations derived from this analysis.