Partner Search Request: PRIDE - Rural territories 100% local Renewable Energies, France

The new forms of rural local communities (communauté de communes in France, Bezirk in Austria, enlarged Gemeinde in Germany etc.: from 5 000 to 50 000 inhabitants) seem to be a well adapted framework for sustainable and systematic development of the Renewable Energies (RenEn). The rural territories are rich in resources (wind, water, wood, livestock wastes, farming) and they can get at least local energy self-sufficiency, respecting economic and environmental balances. The experiment led for three years by the Communauté de Communes du Mené, still very rare in France, confirms this assertion and brings a lot of observations:

• To assess the RenEn resources is a tricky job: it is easy to mistake by a factor 3 or 4 in one direction or in the other
• The consumers know little about their consumption of energy
• The setup of RenEn processes requires both work upstream (energy supplying) and downstream (prescription, installation of the equipment at consumers)
• The complexity of these steps requires competences and know-how, whose acquisition ex nihilo is heavy for a lonely territory entering a process to get energy self-sufficiency
• There is a strong demand from rural territories, for example in France, which don't know how to enter the problem, run up against the barrier of the languages to go to see abroad (often in Central or Northern Europe) and rightly fear to enter alone just with equipment and service suppliers. Moreover, besides some territories very developed in the field, like the Bezirk of Güssing (Austria) or the village of Nordic Folkecenter (Denmark), the territories are not structured to assume the transfers which would allow a faster and surer diffusion in the wide rural area.

Objectives

The objectives of this project, proposed by Communauté de Communes du Mené, France are:

• To multiply the rural territories covering 100% their energy needs with their own renewable resources locally transformed
• To develop a label for "rural territories 100% RenEn based on the local resources"
• To set up a model cluster with territories on different levels in the process: very advanced (with research activities), in the middle and beginners, with a geographical structuring

Expected results

• Implementation of tools and methods for energy assessments adapted to rural territories
• Specification for a label "rural territories 100% RenEn based on the local resources"
• Training modules for transfer and acquisition of know how in energy saving and equipment producing and using renewable energies for the companies in the member territories
• Sustainable job creation in the rural territories, in the medium term

Key actors

• Local territorial communities and governments
• Indirectly: groups and organizations federating the local economic actors (farmers, craftsmen, companies etc.) and associations from the members territories

Key activities and means

• To Identify, analyze and evaluate the practices applied by 5 to 10 rural territories at different stages of RenEn process
• To assess the resources and the energy needs, and methodology for it
• To set up exchanges of services between the participating territories and the actors who are present there (companies, craftsmen, associations, co-operatives, farmers): disposal of fields for test, technology transfer, intelligence, consulting, client assistance etc for the projects carried out by the member territories
• To train the actors of the various territories and develop awareness of the opinion leaders (elected officials, association and company managers)
• To sustain and assess the network: to drive a cluster of local territories

Contact: Marc THERY - energies@mene.fr

Expiry Date: 06/08/2008

The Expiry Date is automatically set to 1 year after the date the partner search form was completed unless otherwise specified by the contact

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