The Municipality of Timișoara as a partner in the "Smart and Sustainable Energy Consumption" Project, acronym SASEC, eMS no.RORS-300, financed through the Interreg IPA Cross-border Cooperation Program Romania–Serbia organized the opening conference for the project on October 30th, 2019, in Timisoara. The event was hosted by the Central Library of the Polytechnic University of Timisoara.
The conference was an important milestone in the project implementation process because it provided the opportunity for the objectives, the activities of each of the four partners as well as the expected results of the project to be presented.
The conference had quite a large audience. Among the 105 participants, there were representatives from local universities – professors, PhD students as well as regular students, along with representatives of the local and county level public administrations, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Environmental Guard, the Institute for Public Health, associations and companies from sectors related to energy and energy efficiency, teachers from the schools involved in the project, media representatives, along with representatives of the project partners from Serbia and Romania.
The four project partners: the City of Zrenjanin (Lead beneficiary), the Regional Agency for Socio-Economic Development - Banat from Serbia, the Romanian Sustainable Energy Cluster - ROSENC and the Municipality of Timișoara (project partners) gave presentations during the two sessions of the conference.
The City of Zrenjanin presented the SASEC project in detail - objectives, activity packages, budget, results and project partner expectations, underlining the importance of the project activities dedicated to the research and collection of energy efficiency data for public buildings, as well as to training different target groups on specific energy efficiency and resource responsible consumption measures, as well as the investments that will be made during the implementation project.
The Romanian Sustainable Energy Cluster - ROSENC presented the proposals for intelligent monitoring in schools that will be carried out within the project, and the Municipality of Timisoara emphasized the role of environmental and climate education in the schools, especially in the current context of climate change, in order to consolidate the information necessary for specific measured to be put into practice and actions to be taken for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible consumption of resources, adaptation to the effects of climate change and transformation of the city into an urban community that is resilient to the effects of climate change.
Energy efficiency and the sustainable consumption of resources were also a topic of the conference and were the subject of a presentation by the Center for Sustainable Production and Consumption Association from Timisoara, underlining the relevance of sustainable energy in national strategies and legislation and the main directions of action for increasing energy efficiency in cities.
The conference also had a Q&A session which proved to be particularly popular amongst the participants who posed a variety of questions to the project partners and made several remarks related to the subject matter.
During breaks participants and project partners had the opportunity to get to know each other, and the end of the conference was marked by a challenge that the moderator launched, regarding the main challenges and potential solutions at the local level for problems related to energy efficiency. Each participant was given the opportunity to put these into writing and all the answers were centralized by the conference organizers to be analyzed at a later date in order to gain new potential perspectives and ideas for future local actions.
The launch conference of the "Smart and Sustainable Energy Consumption” project, acronym SASEC, eMS no. RORS-300 was a real success, and it established the premise for a very good future collaboration between partners and relevant stakeholders that will help achieve the objectives and the results of the project on both sides of the border.
The financing of the project, for the activities of partners on both sides of the border, to be implemented by March 2021, is provided in the proportion of 85% by the European Union through the Interreg IPA Cross-border Cooperation Program Romania–Serbia and is in the total value of 852,001.50 EUR.
