Cities of Santander, Cordoba, Terrassa, Marbella and the Island Council of La Palma are cooperating with eeef on the Technical Assistance
Madrid – Spanish cities Santander, Cordoba, Terrassa and Marbella as well as the Island Council of La Palma will receive Technical Assistance to support project development activities for the energy efficiency programmes to help to achieve 20/20/20 goals. Technical Assistance aims at developing the potential of public authorities to accelerate their investments in the fields of renewable energy, clean urban transportation and energy upgrades of the public infrastructure and at presenting the projects at a later stage to eeef for financing. The public authorities have elaborated comprehensive investment programmes embracing various measures in total reaching €100m that are to be launched for public tender in the cause of the next year. The renovations are scheduled to start from the mid of 2014 onwards. The authorities plan to conduct renovation of up to 100,000 street lighting points and generate 7,942Mwh in renewable energy for own use. The CO2 savings resulting from the energy efficient renovations are estimated to reach more than 25,000tons per year.
According to José Antonio Teixeira, Innovation General Director of the Santander City, the innovative proposal for CO2 reduction made by the City Council of Santander through an comprehensive energy efficiency project and renewable energy use, which covers the entire public lighting system and municipal buildings of the city and supported by the European Energy Efficiency Fund, will allow to achieve another milestone in Santander Smart City development, to boost economically the city and to reduce energy intensity increasing competitiveness.
In the last couple of years the City Council of Marbella developed a strategic plan based on three key measures: reduce municipal energy use, promote use of technologies to facilitate energy savings and increase the use of renewable energy. eeef intends to give an impulse to implementation of this strategy and support the City in realisation of 20/20/20 goals.
Cristina Hernández Carnicer, Counsel of Economic Development of the La Palma Island sees a great opportunity for La Palma Island not only to make considerable energy savings in public lighting and transportation, but also to embrace a new operations and technology model applied to the public services. “With the eeef support, this investments will also allow us to go beyond in the path of shrinking our carbon footprint, giving a more prominent role to renewable energy sources, reducing costs and after all, demonstrating our commitment to environmental stewardship.”
City of Terrassa has been working intensively for years in the fields of renewable energies and energy efficiency and now intends to undertake a series of energy efficiency measures in order to keep their city competitive and sustainable. "We are very sensible to CO2 reduction and we plan to execute a plan around energy reduction.
Terrassa knows for a long time what to do due to alignment of the political strategy of the City Government and the technical model structure, but now the opportunity of the co-operation with eeef will allow to achieve one of the biggest impacts in the area of Catalonia”, notes Xavier Sancliment, Director of Technological Services at Terrassa City Council.
Córdoba City Council seeks the use of different technological alternatives, making extensive use of Information and Communication Technologies, which allow the council to assess the use of different services through a monitoring of public services and infrastructure, such as public gardens, public buildings and urban spaces. The City Council plans to carry out four lines of investment: investment in public lighting, investment in renovation of public buildings, investment in network communications, and finally systems and controls monitor speakers renewable energy investment.
These actions to be undertaken by the City of Cordoba will receive support from the Technical Assistance as a first step to fund an ambitious and comprehensive plan to conduct energy audits on public buildings and public lighting in the city. In the second stage, eeef is also of vital importance because relying on the savings identified in the first stage, eeef should be enabled to propose funding via the selected ESCO in the competitive process.
The European Energy Efficiency Fund S.A., SICAV-SIF is a “société d’investissement à capital variable” governed by Luxembourg law and was initiated by the European Commission in cooperation with the European Investment Bank. The initial capitalization provided by the European Commission was increased with contributions from the sponsors European Investment Bank, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti as well as the Investment manager Deutsche Bank.