The meeting was organized jointly with the third meeting of the Local Stakeholder Group of the Social Green project (Interreg Europe). CEiiA (Center for Engineering and Product Development) and the Commission for Coordination and Development of the North Region (CCDR-N) are the Portuguese partners of the Social Green project, which focuses on "Regional policies to make the social housing sector more ecological", a relevant and complementary theme of the FINERPOL project.
The meeting began with the presentation of the Group of local stakeholders, composed of representatives of municipalities, municipal companies, a national commission for the management of financial instruments and a national energy agency. Then, the technical team of CEiiA presented a summary of the Interreg Europe Program and the frameworks of the FINERPOL project, followed by a summary of the evaluation made to the policy instrument addressed (North 2020 - Operational Program of the Northern Region) and some of the good identified practices. Finally, a representative of the IFRRU 2020 - Financial Instrument for Urban Rehabilitation and Rehabilitation - presented the financing opportunities of this recently created instrument.
At the end of the presentations, a very productive discussion was generated on the disincentives to investment in energy efficiency and the possible solutions to be implemented. The counterproductivity of the eligibility criteria imposed for the financing of projects and the lack of adaptation of the performance indicators to the Portuguese reality were highlighted. One of the suggested solutions was the implementation of a Living Lab for energy efficiency solutions in buildings, to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency (positive and negative) of the solutions adopted, in the context in which they are inserted. The aim is to associate the technical knowledge, the municipal experience and the experimental data of real context, in order to demonstrate the urgency of adapting this policy instrument to the Portuguese reality.
