The first major event of the EMPOWER project was a Peer Review workshop; it was organised by the Veneto Region in cooperation with partners, and took place in Venice on 28th and 29th March 2017.
The EMPOWER project innovatively addresses two urgent challenges in European cities and regions:
- the opportunity to reduce CO2 emissions from buildings using new technology and
- better management and the need for more investment to meet the EU’s CO2 reduction targets.
The objective of the Peer Review was to analyse partners’ plans, share ideas about how to improve regional policies, and review the planned policy improvements.
At the workshop, expert colleagues mutually evaluated the needs of each region and set the context for the capacity building actions that will take place later in the project.
The Peer Review event brought together different experts with the knowledge and experiences related to energy monitoring and financing of energy projects. Each of the 9 project partners involved 2 experts (some staff, some stakeholders). Together, the experts brought a range of knowledge and experience from different fields of energy or finances: policy, planning, technical, monitoring, political,…
The outputs and results of the workshop were developed through a SWOT analysis for each of the partners. Through the analysis we learned some positive and some negative lessons.
The positive lessons are that:
- the experts understand their own energy and financial monitoring system,
- there are many good practices of monitoring in the field already,
- due to the lack of financial resources people are prepared to be innovative to find new sources,
- many financial institutions and funds already have programmes related to energy efficiency improvements in buildings and
- there are no technical barriers regarding energy and financial monitoring.
The negative lessons we learned showed us the weaknesses of using and developing energy and financial monitoring systems. The strategies and regulation do not have exact action plans to implement such monitoring systems. There are a lot of different tools on the market and it is difficult to find the right one. The price of the equipment is too high. There is also a problem with understanding the financial indicators and using different measures and methods. Political decision-makers are not aware of why monitoring is essential, and this is because there is a lack in the communication with higher decision making levels.
But in spite of these weaknesses the workshop participants discovered a lot of opportunities in using such energy and financial monitoring. Crucially, a lot of data has been already collected and with only some small upgrades a good monitoring system could be established. The stakeholders are willing to cooperate and to learn more about the monitoring. Different financial sources are also available on the market or through different public funds. Information and communication technology is developing fast, gets cheaper and it is user friendly. The regions and cities in the EMPOWER project are quite big and they already have the experts working in the energy field. One of the partners is also a Development bank of Saxony Anhalt and the partners can use the opportunity to get a direct advice about financial indicators.
At the end of the workshop partners and experts agreed that:
- Communication activities are very important on different levels, with different stakeholders, using different methods to motivate whole society;
- Training and educational activities are still needed for all stakeholders in different forms and levels;
- Financial monitoring is a basis for good financial and energy management of buildings;
- Technical system and equipment for monitoring is very important.
