By GARETH WILLMER
In 2029, Finland’s oldest city, Turku, will celebrate reaching the great old age of 800. At the same time, it hopes to achieve another major milestone – becoming climate-neutral. The French city of Dijon 2,000 kilometers away hopes to achieve the same goal by 2030.
Both are part of the Cities Mission – an EU initiative to make 100 cities climate neutral by the end of this decade. Turku and Dijon are also core members of the EU-funded RESPONSE project to help cities plan the path to clean energy.
City laboratories
‘We are looking for new ways to empower different types of citizens,’ said David Goujon, the project’s coordinator.
Three quarters of EU citizens live in urban areas. Worldwide, cities account for more than 65% of global energy consumption and more than 70% of greenhouse-gas emissions – making them key players in the fight against global warming.
A wide range of green technologies have been developed, from solar panels to quadruple glazing, but choosing the best mix to meet the particular needs of each city is far from straightforward.
THE RESPONSE sets out nearly 100 options from which cities can choose a mix that works best for their specific situations. Examples include biomethane produced from sewage sludge, predictive home thermostats and high-performance ventilation systems.
The project also runs workshops and hackathons to introduce citizens to available energy-saving tools, encouraging them to use less and lower their bills.
A wide variety of options will be tested in Turku and Dijon, the two “lighthouse cities” of the project. Six “partner” cities – Brussels (Belgium), Zaragoza (Spain), Botoşani (Romania), Ptolemaida (Greece), Gabrovo (Bulgaria) and Severodonetsk (Ukraine) – will seek to apply what has been learned.
A key goal is to create “positive energy districts” in these cities – meaning they produce more energy than they use. The ultimate goal is 20% more energy to be produced than consumed per year, but to achieve a positive balance at least.
Local differences
The idea is to cover a variety of cities with different characteristics and different degrees of sustainability road to test what works for different populations, according to Goujon, sustainable city project manager at the European Institute for Energy Research (EIFER) in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The focus of Turku is its large student population – with the city being home to several universities and around 40 000 students in higher education. The center of Dijon consists of many low-income households with a wide cultural mix of nationalities.
‘These are two completely different worlds that we are responding to,’ says Goujon.
RESPONSE hopes that Turku and Dijon will inspire other European cities to follow and expand their examples.
‘We can inform the European Commission that some of these solutions are perfect in the conditions of Dijon, others are very good in the conditions of Turku, and then the partner cities can learn from this,’ said Monjur Murshed, co-coordinator of RESPONSE and senior project manager for climate-neutral communities at EIFER.
Over the past six months, RESPONSE has carried out activities including the renovation of buildings in Dijon and Turku and the installation of quadruple-glazed windows and solar technologies.
In both cities, the team tested community-based options for generating renewable energy. In a district of Dijon, for example, 1 100 inhabitants will participate in an initiative to harvest solar energy in the second half of 2023. Smart public lighting and infrastructure for electric vehicles, as well as the cloud -based smart energy system, are other options. considered in both cities.
The best way to work should become clearer in the coming year. Goujon and Murshed think that the positive energy goals of the project will be achieved by 2024.
Green purchase
An EU-funded project called XPRESS seeks to increase the use of renewable energy solutions (RES) by city planners by bringing together small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), public authorities and technology user.
The tools developed include a searchable database with RES-related tenders and green public procurement projects in 10 European countries – Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and UK.
The database aims to make it easier for SMEs to access RES tenders and, by extension, increase the adoption of new solutions in cities – leading to greater energy savings and lowering carbon emissions.
XPRESS tries to encourage public authorities to look at the whole long-term environmental impact of products in their life cycle rather than their initial price.
‘The goal is to bring the authorities to write public tenders that take into account the real impact on the environment of the cost of the purchase,’ said the project coordinator Riccardo Coletta of the Agency for the Promotion of European Research (APRE) in Rome, Italy. ‘You cannot consider the price you pay for a service, or for energy or new cars for your public transport fleet.’
Coletta highlighted the developments in electric transportation in the Portuguese city of Braga, which he said has a strong commitment to push green mobility through the development of fully electric buses, promotion of electric vehicle and construction of charging stations.
The Danish island of Samsø, home to 4,000 inhabitants, is another notable case. In 2007, it became the first island in the world to be powered entirely by renewable energy. Community involvement has been key to the island’s rapid development.
Larger areas can build these examples, according to Coletta.
‘One way can be to start producing renewable energy with small communities, and then sell the energy to other communities that can be encouraged by this example,’ he said. ‘It means a bottom-up change from the people.’
The research in this article was funded by the EU. This article was originally published on horizonthe EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
