Barcelona City Council work to minimize environmental impacts arising from the electricity supply of utilities and municipal buildings
The problem addressed is the need for public administrations to establish
echnical instructions to define specific environmental criteria for
purchasing or contracting the electricity supply for public buildings.
• Characterize what is meant by green electricity and the different types of energy that include
• Define priorities in supply
• Define the environmental criteria to be applied
• Establish a monitoring system
The main stakeholders benefiting from this practice are all public buildings belonging to the municipalities or other bodies of a higher entity in which these measures can be taken in order to extrapolate it in the future also to industries and individuals.
Resources needed
This technical instruction (2015) responds to the Government Measure of responsible public procurement with social and environmental criteria (November 2013).
Drafting of the technical instruction with the Barcelona City Council's own resources (environmental department)
Evidence of success
This practice is considered a good measure, because a proper analysis of the needs of each municipal building provided a decrease of its energy needs which would cause an adjustment of the contracted power and a compensation in the emissions of Co2.
If the use of environmental criteria is encouraged in public administration and demonstrated to work well, they can be extrapolated to the private sector in the future
Difficulties encountered
Environmental criteria are created in the general scope of a country with a lower performance or success factor.
It musts be stablished the criteria in a phased manner, with uniform criteria for all and then apply more specific criteria according each region.
Potential for learning or transfer
This practice is highly suited to another region of the European Union because basic green criteria can be established in all public buildings when contracting the electricity supply.
The general criteria should be defined in advance (Basic) when it comes to this type of green procurement for the European Union and then defining criteria for a more specific area by country or geographical region. As for example ecological criteria in the Mediterranean area, ecological criteria Spain, ecological criteria Valencian Community.
The introduction of this type of criterion in the procurement of electricity aims at the creation of new small companies supplying electricity in which their main sources are renewable.
The factors that could make this implementation difficult would be the large electricity supply companies that exist in the whole of the European Union where their main sources of electricity creation are non-renewable sources or pollutants
Tags: Environment
