Energy represents an important part of enterprises' production costs even for non-energy intensive industries, and the availability of affordable, easy to access, energy services is one of the key business development enabler and competitiveness factor. Industrial parks play an important role in the European economy and the improvement of their energy efficiency is the main challenge of this topic. Optimising their energy efficiency can be obtained by stimulating and facilitating energy cooperation among businesses. Such cooperation can be done via clustering buildings and processes, by energy exchange, collective production and joint contracting of mutualised energy services. However, there are a number of barriers that hinder the development of energy cooperation of neighbouring businesses. These barriers are mostly organisational, financial, legal, social and technical.
The use of joint contracting of mutualised energy services is a promising model for industrial parks, especially when businesses are not energy intensive and when they don't have the time, expertise and financial resources to develop such energy cooperation. In that sense, energy services companies have a role to play in providing businesses with high-value services in the form of e.g. heating, electricity, cooling, to master a modern, environmentally friendly, renewable based and energy efficient system in industrial parks relying on the latest technologies and solutions (e.g. highly efficient, renewable and waste/residual recovery based systems, demand response, energy cascades).
Scope:Proposals should improve the energy efficiency of industrial parks (or neighbouring businesses) by unlocking the market potential for energy cooperation and by supporting the demand and offer of mutualised high-quality energy services.
Proposals should address at least one of the following aspects:
Proposals should address legal issues in order to adapt regulatory and legal frameworks at the local, regional and national context. Proposals should also have a cross-cutting perspective and a strong communication and dissemination component to reach as many industries, industrial parks manager and ESCOs as possible and to break the industrial cultural perception of mutualised energy services and energy cooperation.
The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 1 and 2 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.
Expected Impact:Proposed actions are expected to demonstrate the impacts listed below (wherever possible, use quantified indicators and targets), depending on the scope of the proposal:
Please Log In to See This Section