Selection of the geographic area

The selection pane

In the MICATool vizard, the first step is the selection of the geographic area. Users have the choice between the whole European Union as of 2020, a Member State, or a municipality/region in a Member State. For the latter option, the number of inhabitants of the assessed entity is required, in order to allow for the scaling of some national values (see below).

Background

Within the MICAT project, a key element is the possibility to assess energy efficiency measures, policies, and scenarios on three governance levels: European Union, national, and local/regional level. This also means that the data that is used needs to account for these different levels, as well as showing differences between Member States when significant. This is done by providing default data for all relevant geographic areas.

The IDs, inter alia id_region, are described in greater detail here.

In order to distinguish geographic areas accordingly, IDs have been attributed to all Member States and the whole EU area (EU27 in 2020). However, the local level has not been attributed IDs. Instead, the ID of the country is used, while the national data is scaled to the locality or region.

The equation behind the scaling of data can be found here.

The reason behind this approach is the objective within the MICATool to provide an equal coverage for all regions across the European Union. Given the strongly varying availability of datasets across Member States, an equal coverage would thus not have been possible.

As an alternative, an approach scaling down national data has been used. Thereby, absolute values from the national level are scaled down in proportion to the examined locality’s or region’s population. This concerns values such as primary production, gross available energy, dwelling stock, gross domestic product. However, the majority of the stored data is relative and not absolute, describing proportions of a total. For instance, the energy mix is not stated as the consumption in energy units but rather as an energy carrier’s proportion of total energy consumption.

In the future, weighting factors for scaling are being discussed to account for instance for the urbanity of an area, as well as other influencing factors.