Abstract for: Bottom-up and top-down approaches in energy efficiency estimation.

This paper studies the role that energy efficiency improvements can have in Italy. After a wide discussion of the situation of the European Union and Italy in the context of the climate change issue, it proposes two kinds of simulations which aim to measure possible energy efficiency improvements: bottom-up and top-down simulations. They can be seen as complementary methods for studying the savings that can be obtained through energy efficiency. The estimations show that the possible gains are huge, both in energy and monetary terms. Thus, their exploitation should be considered as a fundamental step of the Italian climate change policy.