How to drive energy transition? How to boost the renewable energy produced locally? How to reduce energy consumption?
Lot of questions. Dilemmas that set the concept and the need of a project like POTEnT. Parma City Council has two instruments to answer the above questions: the strength of its stakeholders‘ community, and its Regional Action Plan, a solid base to drive local energy transition!
Citizens' engagement, Renovation, and Renewable Energy: these were the pillars discussed at the Dissemination Event of Parma’s Regional Action Plan. In numbers: 27 participants, 8 presentations, 6 speakers and 1 RAP !
Thursday, May 26th: a warm and sunny day in Parma at San Paolo monastery, an open innovation hub where the city of Parma held POTEnT Dissemination Event, the public disclosure of Parma’s RAP. The event hosted 27 participants, for the most part attending physically (finally!). Among them, the Emilia Romagna Region, research organizations, environmental and energy agencies, and many representatives from Parma City Council joined the meeting.
The three actions of Parma’ RAP address several types of stakeholders with different scopes and interests. However, the vision behind Parma’s RAP is largely inclusive and aims to create a solid framework to harmonize technicians, citizens, environmentalists, policymakers, researchers, social scientists, and teachers to support the transition towards a prosumer culture on several levels.
Action 1 – Bring Young People into Climate Planning: SECAP Laboratories for young people in Parma
Since several years, Parma City Council finances the school program GIOCAMPUS, where school students from high and middle schools are engaged in educational activities related to sport, wellbeing, and sustainability.
Giulia Berni, Giocampus educator, presented some figures showing that Giocampus is the most widespread educational program in Parma and covers almost all middle and high schools in the city.
Thanks to the Interregional Learning activities undertaken during POTEnT, the Energy Office of Parma City Council decided to collaborate with the experts from GIOCAMPUS to spread and disseminate the actions contained in the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan of the City of Parma to involve young people in energy transition planning.
In these laboratories, teenagers will discover the various actions coordinated and implemented by the municipality: starting from the refurbishments of public schools, to the installation of RES plants, ending with the objective to support the spread of energy communities locally. Aside from these laboratories, students will be involved in summer camps in which technicians from the Energy Office will set co-design laboratories on Parma 2030.
Action 2 – a new model for the One Stop Shop: from a facilitator to a coordinator
Parma City Council and the Energy Agency of Parma, ATES, run a One Stop Shop (OSS) since two years. As mentioned by the OSS’ technician, Monica Porcari, the business model of this “energy info point” is now focused on the national bonuses for building retrofitting, providing citizens with technical support during the procedure to access the incentives.
Furthermore, Parma’s OSS has an additional service for its customers: a team of facilitators with technical and social competencies to help the consensus-building processes in multi-apartment blocks. Despite the success of the initiative (more than 40 buildings took part in the project), this one-stop-shop will evolve to strengthen stakeholders’ value chain to support customers not only in renovating their homes but also to be part of an energy community, have loans and be trained on technologies to optimize their consumptions (heat pumps, thermostatic valves, meters).
Action 3 –Feasibility study for an energy community in Parma
Last but not the least, a round table of experts followed the presentation of the third action of Parma’s RAP: developing a feasibility study to create an energy community in a neighborhood in Parma by using a PV plant owned by the municipality. To the audience, several aspects of the topic of energy communities were presented: integration of District Heating with renewable energy, business analysis of a pilot project of collective self-consuming building, and a compared analysis of energy communities in Italy and Portugal.
With great enthusiasm, Parma’s dissemination event ended with many stakeholders chasing each other looking for contacts and email addresses. A good premise for the newborn RAP!
