Report: Fighting to protect the climate - Evaluating the experience

Case Study (183 Kb)

Introduction

As one of the founders of "Climate Alliance", a group of municipalities in Europe formed to protect the climate, Frankfurt am Main decided in 1991 to set a global objective of cutting CO₂ by 50% by the year 2010. To organize the process of CO₂ reduction and to develop an energy concept, the "Energiereferat" was founded as a local energy agency in 1990.

The "Energiereferat" within the Environmental Department is responsible for all private customers (e.g. households, investors and industries), the Energy Section a part of the Building Department of the City of Frankfurt is dealing with energy saving measures in public buildings.

To achieve the ambitious goal on CO₂-reduction, four lines of action are being followed:

• systematically developing combined heat and power (CHP) at big power stations and small or medium sized decentralized co-generation units
• designing low-energy homes with a heat consumption of less than 270 MJ/m² per year and laying down strict heat standards for the urban area
• saving electricity in housing, offices and industry
• promoting solar power and photovoltaic energy
• establish energy auditing and energy saving measures in public buildings.

Summary of Results

Since the Energiereferat started its work, some interesting results have been achieved:

• approximately 3,000 new dwellings have been constructed as low energy houses, with specific heat consumption between 180 and 280 MJ per square meter and year,
• more than 500 appartments in existing housing schemes will be renovated and fitted with improved thermal insulation reducing specific heat consumption by almost 65 %,
• co-generation capacity in small and medium size units has been increased from 100 kWel (1991) to 17,000 kWel (1998),
• the local utility pays 0,07 ECU/kWh for electricity fed into the grid from co-generation and 0,65 ECU/kWh from photovoltaics,
• 160 solar heating systems with a total surface of more than 2,000 mē have been installed,
• CO₂ emissions rose from 7.6 million tonnes in 1987 to 7.85 million tonnes in 1992, falling to 7.3 million tonnes in 1995 (not including traffic).

The energy report 1996 published in summer 1997 provides a detailed analysis of the development of the energy consumption and the emissions according to the different consumption sectors. The report has been made using the GEMIS software.

Apart from the CO₂ reduction by 550 000 t/a from 1991 on, the Energiereferat has also gained experience which is not quantifiable:

• The work done by an energy agency is successful if it cares for the management and the co-ordination of activities acting like a kind of "nerve centre" of the whole business. Therefore, one of the main tasks of a local energy agency consists in making actors with different interests co-operate without being itself dominated by one single group.
• The experience has shown as well that due to existing structural obstacles and due to a lack of motivation and training it is often necessary to discuss always again the same basic questions when starting a project. For this reason an energy agency should be based on a long-term activity and a long-lasting existence. Only a continuous engagement for a special project can guarantee its success.
• The activities undertaken by the agency can only be successful if all partners co-operating within a project can benefit at least of some advantages.
• The agency should not begrudge successful actors the success of their activities even if sometimes the agency has contributed to this success in a very decisive way. In this way, positive initiatives will automatically become known by others. Assistance provided by the energy agency will thus become more and more superfluous at least in some fields in the long-term.

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Energiereferat Stadt Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt Frankfurt Municipal Energy Agency