by Shane Henson — June 25, 2014—The leaders of three projects, EU-GUGLE, R2CITIES and ZenN, involving 15 municipalities, recently announced that they are partnering for greater leverage in sharing and promoting energy-efficient renovation solutions for cities and communities within the European Union.
Joint outreach activities will be conducted under the label “My Smart City District” and will involve a common identity and harmonized presentations, project leaders say. This initiative is geared toward the replication of sustainable renovation models for European cities and communities, and runs in parallel with the renovation works undertaken by the participating projects. It will be the main channel through which the cumulated experiences of the pilot cities involved will be shared with other municipalities.
As ZenN notes, currently, energy consumption associated with building operation is one of the main energy consumption sources in Europe. Given current construction rates, 80 percent of the European building stock in 2050 is already built, and most of this currently existent stock suffers already from poor energy performance.
In addition to the three projects, My Smart City District initiative will embrace other projects from the field along with potential replicators interested in sharing knowledge. Blending the expertise and technologies, and leveraging the experience of working across different districts, building types and legislations are some of the challenges ahead for this European-wide initiative. The blend must be a savvy mix leading to large-scale replicability of sound energy-efficiency solutions, rather than a simple mish mash of good practices without a coherent outlet, project leaders say.
It is this challenge that My Smart City District will strive to address while drawing on the combined forces of the three partners. Altogether, EU-GUGLE, R2CITIES and ZenN cover some 15 European cities from 10 different countries. Their clustering reflects a shared ambition to meet the EU energy targets high on the 2020 agenda, says the coalition.
R2CITES is coordinated by Fundación CARTIF. It was started to develop and demonstrate replicable strategies for designing, constructing, and managing large-scale district renovation projects for achieving nearly zero energy cities.
EU-GUGLE is coordinated by CENER, Spain’s National Centre for Renewable Energies. The project aims to demonstrate the feasibility of nearly zero-energy building renovation models in six pilot cities in view of triggering large-scale, Europe-wide replication in smart cities and communities by 2020.
ZenN is coordinated by Fundación Tecnalia Research and Innovation. Among its aims is to demonstrate the feasibility of innovative low-energy-renovation processes for buildings at the neighborhood scale.
