Biography
Nele Renders graduated in 2005 as bio-engineer in the Environmental Technologies at the KULeuven. In that same year, she started working at VITO in the research team Energy & Emissions Monitoring and Projections. She was involved in scenario & cost benefit analysis (energy, GHG and air pollutants) for multiple local governments, the Flemish as well as the Belgian government (MMR). In this context, she was responsible for the residential and services sectors. She managed the development of the heat map for Flanders, including the cost abatement analysis, as required by Article 14 of the Energy Efficiency Directive EED. In frame of the European Topic Centre of the European Environmental Agency EEA, she is responsible for tracking the progress of Member States toward the energy efficiency targets, next to evaluating heating & cooling policies in the EU Member States. Supporting energy agencies in the implementation of Article 3 and Article 7 of the EED (savings & target setting; EEOs and alternative measures), is the main objective the of H2020 funded project streamSAVE.eu which Nele is coordinating As a project manager, Nele assisted DG Energy in assessing the implementation status and effectiveness of Article 17 of the EED. Next to energy efficiency, she supports European institutions in domain of the Monitoring Mechanism Regulation MMR by looking to GHG projections in hindsight (EEA), evaluating the Effort Sharing Decision, as well as building capacity to facilitate the implementation of the Effort Sharing Legislation (ex-post evaluation and policy lessons learned) under the authority of DG Climate Action.
Organisation
VITO is a leading European independent research and technology organisation in the areas of cleantech and sustainable development, elaborating solutions for the large societal challenges of today. VITO provides innovative and high-quality solutions; whereby large and small companies can gain a competitive advantage and advises industry and governments on determining their policy for the future. VITO has over 850 highly-qualified employees who work on international projects all around the world. VITO’s research agenda tackles the major societal challenges we are facing today. VITO focuses on five different research programmes: sustainable chemistry, energy, health, materials management and land use. In VITO’s five areas of expertise, a societal transition is taking place or is urgently needed. Smart grids & energy networks, intensive re-use of resources, a bio-based economy, all these developments require new and better sustainable technologies, as well as a change in mindset. That’s why VITO is working hard on sustainability and transition thinking as binding factors between the five research programmes.
The Sustainable Energy and Built Environment Unit has strong experience in the evaluation and compliance of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) in different member states, plus expertise in derivation of building codes and building energy calculations within the framework of the EPBD. This team also leads projects related to energy policy evaluations as well as compliance checks, smart financing of Energy Efficiency initiatives, and climate policies and measures in frame of Monitoring & Mechanism Regulation, for the European Commission (DG ENER & DG CLIMA) and the European Environment Agency (lead partner of the European Topic Centre for Climate Change mitigation and Energy).
Visit their website: https://vito.be/en