Phantom Figures

The European Commission published its biennial Renewable Energy Progress Report on 1 February 2017. This report relies on figures submitted in each member state's national progress report.

For previous versions, the national reports have been published alongside the EC progress report. But the 2017 report was published alone.

It could not have been prepared without receiving and verifying all of the national reports. So why have the national reports been withheld this time?

We contacted the EU on 18 March to ask why the reports were missing, via their EU Direct service, the only route they offer for written enquiries:

Why have the national Progress Reports for 2017 under the Renewable Energy Directive not been published alongside the Commission Progress Report, as they were in 2015, 2013 and 2011? They must have been received and vetted before the EU Progress Report could have been compiled. They could be published in their original languages (as they were in 2015) even if they are in the process of translation.

We received an automated reply immediately from a noreply address:

Thank you for your e-mail. We expect to respond in three working days on average. For more complex or specific queries, responses may take longer.

After around a week of no response, we rang the EU Direct contact line, as no option is offered to follow up on enquiries in writing. They advised that the enquiry was considered to be complex and had been forwarded to the relevant department (presumably DG ENER).

Yesterday (11 Apr), we received the following communication from EU Direct:

Thank you for your message. Your enquiry is being dealt with in consultation with another EU department. Therefore, it may take longer to receive a reply. We thank you for your patience.

You would think someone at DG ENER would know why the national reports haven't been published. If there is an innocent answer, would they be unable for 4 weeks to provide it, and would the reports still be missing 10 weeks after the EC report was published?

My guess is that they will eventually claim that the national reports were withheld until all translations were complete. But if so, why would they not have provided this explanation promptly? And is it really persuasive that they couldn't publish the reports in their original language, even if the translations weren't available? Shouldn't we be able to check the figures on which the EC report is based, and do our own analysis? A lot of important information is obscured by the aggregated or indexed figures in the EC report.

In all likelihood, the real reason is that there are some questionable figures or plans in some of the reports. But if so, why would they not have resolved those issues before publishing the EC Report?

The UK's report may be part of the problem. We know that the renewable heat figures are inflated by claims of very large and increasing contributions from unmeasured and unsupported biomass heat installations (open fires and stoves). These figures are based on assumptions that are very hard to justify. If more reasonable assumptions were applied, the contribution from this sector would be static or falling, rather than large and increasing, and the UK government would consequently be well off-target. It is a sad reflection on the state of British government and the Office of National Statistics that they have taken to Argentine methods of statistical manipulation.

With any luck, the Commission is investigating cases like this, and can't tell us until a conclusion has been reached. There is a danger of a political resolution that agrees to pretend there is no problem, in exchange for concessions in the Brexit negotiations. It may suit both sides to pretend that the UK is doing better than it really is, although it remains to be seen whether Eurostat can be pressurised to comply. If the national reports are eventually published without a credible explanation for why they were withheld for so long, we can infer that that is what occurred.