The transport sector in the Integrated Database of the European Energy System – Methodological update and potential for transport policy analysis

This article describes the features and typical application of the latest release of the Joint Research Centre's Integrated Database of the European Energy System (JRC-IDEES-2021). JRC-IDEES is an analytical database that harmonizes statistics of the EU energy system and provides highly disaggregated indicators at the level of each individual end use of energy, reporting annual data for 2000–2021 and each EU country. The database is thus suitable to analyse historical EU trends and to serve as input for EU energy modelling or policy analysis. This article focuses on JRC-IDEES’ transport sector database, which covers energy intensities, vehicle sales, vehicle stock, activity and operational data for all fuel/powertrain technologies across all passenger and freight transport modes. The resulting level of resolution exceeds existing primary statistics, while ensuring consistency across indicators and drawing on extensive data sources to provide a technically plausible picture of the evolution of individual modes and technologies. The article first describes the key data sources and calibration methodology used to produce the JRC-IDEES transport dataset. The resulting disaggregated indicators are then contrasted with the sparser breakdown available from Eurostat, revealing recent EU-level trends in the energy use of passenger cars and heavy goods vehicles that would have been masked by aggregate primary statistics. A clustering analysis further explores country-level historical patterns for 2000–2019 and highlights the mode-specific impact of alternative fuel adoption on the share of fossil fuels in road transport, illustrating insights that can be gained by coupling JRC-IDEES’ granular data with advanced data analysis methods.