housing, as intended by energy and emissions reduction policies? The only published research appears to be the 2011 CCMA Local Authority Energy Management Survey (SEAI, 2011c), a basic questionnaire survey, and Energy Use in the Public Sector (SEAI, 2012h), both published in Summer 2012, as this research was completed. The 2008 Climate Change Strategy for Dublin City (DCC/Codema, 2008) and the 2010 Dublin City Sustainable Energy Action Plan (DCC/Codema, 2010b) describe past energy usage and emissions, proposed actions and targets, and future scenarios, but do not describe existing practices and attitudes to energy management as they relate to policy implementation. No detailed specific literature on Dublin or Irish local authority energy management and retrofit planning was found in literature searches. Literature on good practice for assessing large, private sector, energy users' energy management performance is readily found (see Section 2.4 and 2.6). A common method used in Europe and North America is the qualitative assessment based on an energy management matrix (EMM) approach. A variant of this is EMM auditing used by the Environmental Protection Agency for Integrated Pollution Prevention Control energy efficiency auditing, also recommended by SEAI for use in the Large Industry Energy Network (LIEN) programme (EPA, 2003; Wajer, 2005).
As large local
authorities are significant energy users it was deemed appropriate to use this as a framework in assessing current, local authority energy management practice. An EMM was therefore the basic framework guiding the methodology and analysis for this research.
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