is a...

The objective of NEEDS is to contribute to the assessment of external costs of alternative energy cycles and evaluate the full costs and benefits i.e., direct and external, of energy policies and of future energy systems.  The project is aimed both at individual countries and to the newly enlarged European Union. 

The project is scheduled to run for four years (Sept 2004 - Aug 2008) and involves more than 80 partners from all over Europe. 

NEEDS stands for...

New Energy Externalities Developments for Sustainability and  is composed of a series of research streams:

• 1a) LCA of new technologies
• 1b) New and improved methods to estimate the external costs of energy conversion
• 1c) Externalities association with the extraction and transport of energy
• 1d) Extension of the geographical coverage of current knowledge of energy externalities
• 2a) Modeling internalization strategies, including scenario building
• 2b) Energy Technology Roadmap and Stakeholder Perspectives
• 3a) Transferability and generalisation
• 3b) Dissemination and communication

HELIO is participating...

in stream 2b: Energy Technology Roadmap and Stakeholder Perspectives,

We are responsible for identifying and analysing the conditions necessary for effective strategy formulation and implementation based on internalization of external costs.  HELIO is also in charge of soliciting stakeholder feedback and transmitting it to the larger project group. 

The specific objectives for this work stream are:

• To address and evaluate sustainability of the candidate technologies and technology mixes, taking into account their performance under economic, environmental and social criteria;
• To investigate the sensitivity or results of sustainability assessment to specific patterns in stakeholder preferences;
• To explore to what extent stakeholders accept the assessed external costs as the basis for internalisation; and,
• To examine possible differences in the ranking of options established by employing alternative approaches to the evaluation.

For a full description of the project and a listing of all the project partners, click here.  

Click here for information about the European Union's work on energy externalities.