After the Workshop held at the end of August, on 12th of September, another regional workshop took place in Mainz with sixteen energy and climate protection managers of municipalities in Rhineland-Palatinate which already have or just started implementing energy management systems in their authorities. Hence, it has been talked about ways to implement and an energy management and occurring problems. The results of the online questionnaire were presented and discussed. It was agreed that overall financial problems are a great barrier to the implementation of energy efficiency measures in local authorities and that public funding is essential to overcome this burden. On the same hand energy management systems and rising awareness can help to save energy in the public building stock without any construction measures and great financial investments. One participant stated: “the first 15 percent of energy savings can be reached without spending one Euro”.
On October 23rd the results of the stakeholder questionnaire was discussed with the regional officers of the Energy Agency Rhineland-Palatinate. It showed them that their impressions of their daily work are shared by other stakeholders in Rhineland-Palatinate. That local authorities in RLP do have a lack of investment capacities when it comes to the building stock wasn’t a surprise and that funding programs are essential for the implementation of energy efficiency measures neither.
More than 45 regional actors took part in the first regional workshops and in the discussion of the questionnaire results. In this way, important findings were obtained for the regional background analysis. As a result of the workshops, the municipalities want to deepen the topic at further events. The planned workshops within the SUPPORT project will provide an opportunity to do so. The network and the municipalities are very interested in the questionnaire results from the project partner countries and would like to know whether there are similar problems and whether the life cycle cost approach or other ideas may be pursued as a solution set. It is planned to answer these questions with the information from the regional background analyses of the SUPPORT project partners and to discuss these questions with the “Energy-efficient construction and housing” network in 2018.
