The Western Macedonia University of Applied Sciences (TEIWM) organized the workshop of the 2nd phase, that took place in Kozani, Western Macedonia, Greece, on the 24th of January 2019.
FINERPOL has entered the 2nd phase and monitors the implementation of its action plan, focusing on actions that can establish financial instruments for energy renovation projects. The action that is going to be influenced is the “Development or upgrade of district heating networks” and involves an amount of 6 M€. The influenced call of the ROPWM2014-2020 will support Pilot District heating projects “with the utilization of biomass and similar sources of energy for the use of Renewable Energy Technology in Public Buildings of small Municipalities of Western Macedonia”
The call will require from the pilot district heating projects to be accompanied with the preliminary steps for the establishment of innovative Public – Private Partnerships (PPPs) between Municipalities and ESCOs that involve investments on energy efficiency and RES coming from loans and/or private funds for the extension of the District Heating Projects in larger scale.
The TEIWM is already supporting technically one municipality of the region in order to apply successfully to the aforementioned call. In this workshop, issues that came up during the implementation of the action plan and during the technical support procedure are discussed among the participants including business advisors, ESCOs, engineers from research centers (TEIWM, CERTH/CPERI) and development agencies and the supported municipality.
The first technical results of the research on the pilot district heating project were presented, such as the public buildings that will be connected to the district heating network, the required installed capacity of the RES thermal unit, the network characteristics, its expansion potential to the whole town, competing technologies, etc. The last two parameters are very important for the establishment of the relevant financial instrument. Therefore, all the participants agreed that an official and prompt meeting with the Managing Authority of the ROPWM2014-2020 is necessary, in order to verify the influence of FINERPOL project on the forthcoming call.
