Final Conference of the Interreg MED project ENERJ

The final conference of ENERJ on September 11 in Thessaloniki brought together the partners of this Interreg MED project with a group of national and international experts to review the results obtained and put them into the larger perspective of the energy transformation in the Mediterranean, with the contribution of FEDARENE’s member Cyprus Energy Agency (CEA).

ENERJ (Joint Actions for Energy Efficiency) is an Interreg MED modular project and aimed at enhancing and improving the coordination of Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAPs and SECAPs) and other relevant Energy Efficiency Plans. The project developed and tested a methodology for increasing cooperation among public authorities through Joint Actions transferring the most promising methods in the partner regions.

After an introductory speech by Kostas Pallas, president of the Metropolitan Council of the Region of Central Macedonia and vice-president of the lead partner of ENERJ, Anatoliki, where he encouraged the audience that the energy transformation starts from the local level, and it is projects like ENERJ that create the basis, a series of speeches were presented by different experts on the topic.

To connect and to train different public authorities was the sense of the training activities in ENERJ. “Each municipality has its own way of doing things, and we trained joint action coordinators to take this into account when elaborating a common project. To look also for the way, the political representatives and the technical staff collaborate” were the words of Vanja Cencič from the Slovenian energy agency GOLEA in her presentation of the training activities organized by the partners.

An interesting case study on horizontal governance was presented by the Italian architect and planner Tiziana Gallo. Her research in Fano in the Region of Marche provides the local governments, private investors, citizens and ESCOs with GIS referenced energy data on clusters of buildings for developing projects and applying for financing.  The final conference concluded with the presentation of the ENERJ database by the responsible partner, the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital and its potentials also as a complementary instrument to the tool, developed in the context of the Interreg MED project SISMA and upgraded in the context of the Interreg MED project ENERJ.

The final conference of ENERJ will not be the final word. The ENERJ database will be freely accessible for the next five years to be of use for the many local entities whose data have been and will be inserted there to move ahead one of the most important fields of action for energy transformation – energy efficiency in the building sector.