From legal obligation to real impact: The challenge of implementing mandatory energy-efficient procurement in Europe

The move from voluntary to mandatory requirements 

Green Public Procurement (GPP) has long been recognised as a potential tool for reducing the environmental impact of government purchasing, while supporting a wider economic transition to more sustainable modes of production and consumption. However, despite its promises, the voluntary uptake of GPP has been slow. Indeed, despite long-term efforts to promote and encourage the voluntary uptake of GPP in Europe over the past three decades, the recent evaluation of the Public Procurement Directives found that still only around 25 percent of contracts reportedly contain GPP criteria (European Commission 2025). This substantially reduces the ability of public purchasing to leverage market transformation. 

One of the most effective ways to increase the uptake of green purchasing is to make GPP requirements mandatory. For this reason, the shift from voluntary to mandatory green public procurement has been gaining momentum both in Germany and across the EU. In Germany, the Climate Change Act (KSG, 2019) and its implementing regulation General Administrative Regulation on the Procurement of Climate-Friendly Services (AVV Klima, 2022) require federal procurers to factor in CO₂ prices and life cycle costs, assess greenhouse gas emissions from the outset of procurement, apply energy efficiency labels, and ban certain climate-damaging products outright. Germany’s Circular Economy Act (KrWG, 2020) adds a further obligation to give preference to products that are resource-efficient, made from recyclates or renewable materials, and designed for durability and recyclability.

At the European level, an increasingly complex landscape of mandatory requirements is emerging from various legislative frameworks, including the Energy Efficiency Directive (2023/1791), the Clean Vehicles Directive (2019/1161), the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (2024/1781), the Batteries Regulation (2023/1542), the Construction Products Regulation (2024/3110), the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (2025/40) and the Net Zero Industry Regulation (2024/1735).

Through our projects, Oeko-Institut actively supports authorities at the national, European and international level to interpret and implement mandatory requirements. And one thing has become consistently clear across all of this work: the legal act is just the starting point. 

Implementing Article 7 of the Energy Efficiency Directive 

The goal of the recast Energy Efficiency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/1791, or EED) is to reduce Europe’s overall energy consumption. It is therefore central to achieving the EU’s climate ambition, while enhancing present and future energy security and affordability. Within the EED, Article 7 contains a requirement on public authorities across all EU Member States to ‘purchase only products, services, buildings and works with high energy-efficiency performance’. The requirement applies to all public procurement contracts above EU thresholds and includes requirements to buy only energy-labelled products from the highest available energy label class, tyres with the highest class of fuel efficiency, buildings which meet Nearly Zero-Energy Building (NZEB) standards, or products and services which meet the ‘core’ criteria of the EU’s GPP Criteria (or national equivalents).

In addition, the energy consumption and energy savings of purchases must also now be documented through standardised eForms published in Tenders Electronic Daily (TED), the EU's official procurement journal. 

The mandatory requirements of the EED thus offer an exciting opportunity to align procurement practices across Europe as well as increase data on the impact of public procurement. However, challenges in the implementation of these requirements are now being encountered.

In early 2026, our study team conducted research on contracting authorities and experts across Europe identified various challenges, including uncertainty among contracting authorities on the scope of Article 7 and difficulty calculating the energy efficiency impacts of procurement. 

Provide targeted support to public authorities in their procurement activities

In late 2025, Oeko-Institut — along with its project partners TECNALIA and REVOLVE — began work on a contract commissioned by the European Commission's DG Energy, with the specific aim of supporting public authorities across the EU in implementing Article 7 of the EED. The goal of this support package is to increase awareness of the obligations laid out in the EED and provide practical guidance and support tools which can help procurers pragmatically achieve their obligations. We are also working directly with the Commission and the Publications Office on improving the eForms used for reporting in TED, with the aim of making compliance reporting simpler, clearer, and more useful for monitoring purposes.

A Community of Practice for public procurers on the EU's Public Buyers Platform — a structured space for sharing experience, accessing guidance, and exchanging best practice — is also being established for public buyers.

Monitoring energy-efficient procurement

Mandatory requirements are only as effective as the systems in place to monitor them. Without robust monitoring and evaluation, it is impossible to know whether legal obligations are being met, whether they are delivering real energy savings, or where further support is needed. This is a lesson that applies globally: Oeko-Institut's own research on monitoring and evaluation frameworks for sustainable public procurement found that, while around two-thirds of countries with Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) programmes have some form of monitoring in place, the vast majority focus on outputs — the number of tenders including sustainability criteria — rather than outcomes, i.e. the actual energy saved, emissions reduced, or costs avoided . 

This distinction matters. Output-focused monitoring can create perverse incentives, rewarding contracting authorities for ticking boxes while missing the real goal of a greener, lower-energy economy. Monitoring outcomes — actual energy consumption and savings — is what allows policy-makers to evaluate whether mandatory requirements are working, and to make the case for further ambition.

The EED's reporting requirements in TED eForms represent a significant step in the right direction: for the first time, contracting authorities are required to do more than apply energy efficiency criteria; they must also document the energy consumption and savings of their purchases. However, calculating these figures in practice is far from straightforward. The diversity of products, services, buildings and works covered by Article 7 means that no single methodology applies across the board. For energy-labelled products, consumption data can in principle be drawn from the EU Product Registry for Energy Labelling (EPREL). For other products, services and works, the picture is far more complex: boundary problems arise in service contracts, where it is unclear which energy consumption should be attributed to the contract; and for many product categories, there are simply no established default values or calculation tools that a time-pressed contracting authority can realistically apply. International experience shows that even well-resourced countries with mature GPP frameworks — such as Japan and the Republic of Korea — have invested significantly in developing product-specific proxy values and calculation methodologies to make outcome monitoring feasible on a large scale. In the EU context, this groundwork has not yet been laid for the full scope of products and services covered by Article 7.

A central part of Oeko-Institut's work for the Commission is therefore focused on closing this gap by developing practical, differentiated methodologies for calculating energy efficiency impacts that are technically sound but also realistic and proportionate in terms of the effort they require from contracting authorities. The goal is not methodological perfection, but pragmatic progress: clear, usable guidance that allows a contracting authority to report meaningfully on what it has purchased, and that — over time — generates the data needed to evaluate the effectiveness of Article 7 in delivering the energy savings that Europe needs.

The future trajectory of mandatory requirements 

The trajectory from voluntary to mandatory GPP is clear — and right. The evidence from international experience shows that mandatory requirements, well-designed and well-supported, can drive real market transformation. The energy savings, cost reductions, and innovation incentives that well-implemented GPP can deliver are real.

But the experience of mandatory requirements at EU level — from the original Clean Vehicles Directive, which led to only modest results despite being legally binding, to the early phase of Article 7 EED implementation — also shows that the law alone is not enough. To avoid that mandatory requirements don’t remain on paper, clear scope, guidance, reporting infrastructure, and are required to support implementation and ensure successful procurement outcomes. The work that Oeko-Institut is conducting for the Commission is an attempt to close that gap — to make sure that the legal obligation translates into actual practice. 

Looking ahead, the EU's current Public Procurement Directive (2014/24/EU) is under review, and the debate around its revision has placed mandatory sustainability requirements firmly on the agenda. Calls are growing to shift from the current framework — in which green criteria are permitted but largely optional — to one in which mandatory environmental requirements are embedded directly in the core procurement legislation and applied horizontally across all public purchasing.

Ashleigh McLennan is a researcher in the division Sustainable Products & Material Flows at Oeko-Institut. She works on green and sustainable public procurement policy at European and international level.