EIE project BALANCE

Balance globally, evaluate locally

The BALANCE project is based on the European Energy Award®, which is currently applied by about 320 municipalities within 9 European countries.  

With the assistance of the eea® tools enormous energy and cost savings have been realised in recent years. But there is still a great demand by local authorities to determine the quantitative effects of their local energy policy and individual measures, particularly energy and CO₂ savings. A number of municipalities have drawn up energy/CO₂ balances or energy saving estimations of measures to monitor the effects of their energy policy. However, they are often uncertain about which software tool, data base and methodology is best for their particular needs. Consequently, there is a lack of knowledge as well as a harmonised methodology or tool which the key actors in the energy sector could use.

Following the request of several communities, BALANCE aims to improve the existing eea® tools by adding the features of a harmonised energy and CO₂ balancing at municipal level in general (top-down) and energy and CO₂ saving potentials of individual hard as well as soft measures in particular (bottom-up).

The BALANCE project, which is supported by the European Commission, officially started on January 1^st, 2006 and will be finished at the end of 2007.

The following results for the top-down approach has been achieved so far:

• An overview on available European tools was elaborated.
• The project team decided against a single software solution but defines requirements for an energy and CO₂ balance on municipal level.
• Regional workshops with stakeholders and up-coming users took place in seven countries. Some of the main results are:
  The level of statistical information is widely spread. The most detailed information is available in Austria and Switzerland . In these two countries a harmonised tool for energy and CO₂ balancing has already been implemented. In Germany around 10 to 20 % of the municipalities have balancing systems in place but there is no common approach. A harmonised methodology or tool would be very welcome. Only few municipalities in Italy have got an energy balance. The CO₂ emissions are taken into account but there isn’t a standardised method.
• The existing software tools available in Europe were checked with regard to the requirements and recommendations for software tools were made.

The following results for the bottom-up approach has been achieved so far:

• First of all a decision between an enlargement of the existing eea® tool or developing an complementary tool has to be made by the project team.
• A new tool with a similar structure to the assessment tool should be developed to keep the tools simple and user-friendly for the estimation and monitoring of measures.
• The aim is to develop a very simple tool which could be enlarged very easily if necessary.
• For the monitoring of the energy policy efforts the project team choose for the moment 23 macro – and micro indicators in the six areas of the assessment tool. Further indicators should easily be addable.
• The indicators are directly connected with a calculation of energy and CO₂ savings which could be expected when changing the indicators.
• Some examples from the indicators list are:
  • Electricity consumption private households per inhabitant
  • Street lighting per street meters or lighting point
  • m²  installed solar thermal/inhabitant
  • Modal split
  • Financial and eea® staff resources for energy projects in € per 1000 inhabitant
  • Low energy houses in m²/habitant

The next steps are

Finalising the tools, testing the tools in municipalities and optimising the tools based on the comments of the testing municipalities.

If you need any further information or would like to take part in the project as a testing community do not hesitate to contact the respective organisation in your country. For other countries which are not on the list please contact the project manager Gabi Zink-Ehlert.

Organisation	Country	Name	Email contact
B.&S.U. Beratungs- und Service-Gesellschaft Umwelt mbH	Germany	Gabi Zink-Ehlert	gzink(at)bsu-berlin.de
Österreichische Energieagentur,  Austrian Energy Agency (A.E.A.)	Austria	Silke Mader	silke.mader(at)energyagency.at
SWS Group Ltd	Ireland	Jitske Burgers	jitske.burgers(at)sws.ie
Agenzia Regionale per l'Energia della Liguria Spa	Italy	Chiara Tavella	are.tavella(at)filse.it
Forum European Energy Award e.V.	Germany	Cornelia Brandes	info(at)european-energy-award.org
Lithuanian Energy Institute	Lithuania	Feliksas Zinevicius	felix(at)mail.lei.lt
SEVEn,  Stredisko pro efektivni vyuzivani energie, o.p.s.	Czech republic	Pavel Karnik	pavel.karnik(at)svn.cz
Ecofys b.v	Netherlands	Maxim Luttmer	m.luttmer(at)ecofys.nl