Stakeholders from regional support and development organisations and the business community gathered in Heinola to be acquainted with the SME POWER and RESINDUSTRY project goals and provide feedback on the mapping work done so far.
Heinola City organised the session together with the RESINDUSTRY Interreg Europe project that is going on in the same region as SME POWER with synergic goals and timetable. Coherently, presentations of both projects opened the meeting.
Climate and Energy Expert Maarit Virtanen representing the Regional Council of Päijät-Häme addressed the ongoing work on regional climate road-map. The region aims at carbon neutrality in 2020 and reduction of emission with 80 percent from year 2007, supported with addition of the amount of carbon sinks.
Senior Adviser from Technology Industries of Finland, Martti Kätkä, gave a presentation on general energy consumption in Finland accompanied with concrete business cases and overall view on bio-energy potential in promotion of energy efficiency and battle with climate change. Technology Industries is the lobbying organisation for the Finnish technology industry companies.
Senior Energy Expert Anna-Stiina Luoma from Caverion Ltd. demonstrated practices in development of energy efficiency in SMEs and industrial companies. Caverion designs, implements, maintains and maintains user-friendly and energy-efficient technical solutions for real estate, businesses and industry and infrastructure in Northern, Central and Eastern Europe.
Head of Business and Vitality Unit of Heinola city, Heikki Mäkilä, introduced results of a profound mapping of policies and instruments that are available for SMEs for implementing energy efficiency measures in their businesses. The first feedback was that the mapping was extremely profound and gave a picture of the instruments available, but also the complexity and challenges in front of SMEs, hindering them from fully exploiting the available support mechanisms.
In addition, a short summary of answers to a specific SME POWER and RESINDUSTRY questionnaire survey was pitched during the meeting. The questionnaire had been distributed to the RES Group in advance with questions relating to issues such as energy efficiency investments and their potential bottlenecks.
