The European Union (EU) is highly dependent on external natural gas supplies and has experienced severe gas cuts in the past, mainly driven by the technical complexity of the high-pressure natural gas system and political instability in some of the supplier countries. Declining indigenous natural gas production and growing demand for gas in the EU has encouraged investments in cross-border transmission capacity to increase the sharing of resources between the member states, particularly in the aftermath of the Russia–Ukraine gas crisis in January 2009. This article models the EU interconnected natural gas system to assess the impact of investments in the gas transmission network by comparing the performance of the system for scenarios of 2009 and 2017, using a mathematical optimization approach. The model uses the technical data of the infrastructures, such as production, storage, regasification, and exchange capacity through cross-border pipelines, and proposes an optimal collaborative strategy which ensures the best possible coverage of overall demand. The actual peak demand situations of the extreme cases of 2009 and 2017 are analyzed under hypothetical supply crises caused by geopolitical or commercial disputes. The application of the proposed methodology leads to results which show that the investments made in this system do not decongest the cross-border pipeline network but improve the demand coverage. Countries such as Spain and Italy experience a lower impact on gas supply due to the variety of mechanisms available to cover their demand. Furthermore, the findings prove that cooperation facilitates the supply of demand in crisis situations.

Energy efficiency requirements in Europe are set by the Energy Efficiency Directive, considering energy audits as a systematic procedure to determine the savings in energy costs. These kinds of tools provide useful information for companies to identify opportunities for the improvement of their energy performance. However, the regulation is only applied for non-SMEs in Europe, which make up only 0.2% of the total number of European companies. Compared in terms of the value added or the number of employees, these companies are still at a lower percentage than small and medium enterprises. The wide versatility of small companies, however, makes it difficult to determine a regulation that promotes the objective of the Directive in a uniform way. For this reason, one aspect that is being worked on with small companies is raising awareness and training in energy aspects, encouraging them to carry out activities to improve their energy performance based on their own initiative. In this regard, within the framework of an H2020 research project based on the automotive sector, the E2DRIVER project, a collaborative–cooperative training methodology has been designed to motivate and empower the key actors within a company. This paper describes the methodology and its implementation in different companies in European countries, providing some representative results.

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