The European Union is giving more and more emphasis to its energy policies, reinforcing a political commitment to very high energy savings, with the aim to achieve a more competitive, secure and sustainable European energy system.

Increased energy efficiency is vital to achieve the challenging goals set for the future and energy efficiency constitutes one of the five dimensions of the European Commission's Energy Union Package, designed to enhance energy security, sustainability and competitiveness.

Within this policy context, this report focused on the 2010/31/EU Directive on the Energy

Performance of Buildings and the 2012/27/EU Directive on Energy Efficiency, describing an initial set of pilot activities undertaken to enable and test the use of geospatial technologies in Digital Government processes and services related to energy efficiency EU policies, aiming to show, through a set of use cases, that accurate and interoperable location-based information can lower the barriers faced by government, companies and citizens involved in the energy efficiency policies’ lifecycle.

The approach adopted is based on the INSPIRE Directive 2007/2/EC, establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in Europe to support Community environmental policies, and policies or activities which may have an impact on the environment, such as energy policies.

The enabling role played by INSPIRE consists in the provision of common data models and common data access rules adopted by all EU MS and a roadmap to provide interoperable datasets of high relevance with energy efficiency.

The report has identified a series of next steps to be undertaken to achieve the expected benefits deriving from the use of interoperable location-based information within the analysed energy policy instruments and to solve the issues encountered.