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In May 2013, the European Commission received a mandate from the European Council to “to present an analysis of the composition and drivers of energy prices and costs in Member States, with a particular focus on the impact on households, SMEs and energy intensive industries, and looking more widely at the EU's competitiveness vis-à-vis its global economic counterparts”.

Following such mandate and in view of the preparation by the Commission of a Communication and a Staff Working Document, DG Enterprise and Industry commissioned CEPS to carry out a set of studies aimed at providing well-grounded evidence about the evolution and composition of energy prices and costs at plant level within individual industry sectors. A team of CEPS researchers conducted the research, led by Christian Egenhofer and Lorna Schrefler. Vasileios Rizos acted as Project Coordinator.

In addition to this ceramics sectoral case study on wall and floor tiles, for which Fabio Genoese was the lead author, CEPS prepared five other studies for this project: an introductory report entitled “About the Study and Cross-Sectoral Analysis”and four other sectoral case studies: one other on ceramics (bricks and roof tiles), two others on chemicals (ammonia and chlorine) and one on flat glass. Each of these six studies is posted separately for free downloading on the CEPS website.

The specific objective was to complement information already available at macro level with a bottom-up perspective on the operating conditions that, in terms of energy prices and costs, industry stakeholders need to deal with. The approach chosen was based on case studies for a certain number of (sub-)sectors amongst energy-intensive industries. A standard questionnaire was circulated and respondents were sampled according to specified criteria. Data and information collected were finally presented in a structured format in order to guarantee comparability of results between the different (sub-)sectors analysed.

The complete set of files can also be downloaded from the European Commission’s website.