Happy new year 2016!

We hope all of you had a good start into 2016 and some relaxing holidays!

2015 has been a busy year at PLEEC project. It´s time to cast a glance back..

The year started with a busy and productive project meeting in Santiago de Compostela where the whole consortium met for three days. Main focus was a workshop on WP6 content, where the city partners got valuable recommendations from the university experts on how to raise their energy efficiency from the technological, structural and behavioral perspective.  

Furthermore all city partners organized their 2nd Local Dialogue Forums. The Local Dialogue Forums are an opportunity to disseminate the project on local level and discuss results and further strategies with local stakeholders and the interested public. Topics included the following: Sustainable Energy Action Plan for Tartu City (Tartu), Energy state of Santiago and Energy Efficiency Action Plan for Santiago City (Santiago de Compostela), grocery stores and how they can become more efficient (Eskilstuna), Stoke-on-Trent energy efficiency planning model and structure driven energy efficiency potentials for Stoke-on-Trent, resource wisdom at workplace (Jyväskylä).

In June our project partner TU Vienna invited us to the public meeting "Energy efficiency in cities - monitoring of energy related urban development with special focus on quality of life" which brought together Smart Cities in Austria and the PLEEC cities in order to share information on energy efficiency in cities and initiate learning processes. The event was organized in cooperation with the Austrian Climate and Energy Funds together with the Austrian Association of Cities. 

In September we have organized our third and last Energy Efficiency Forum titled “Planning resilient and livable regions. Urban-rural interactions”. This year it took place in Tartu and was hosted in cooperation with the Nordic-Baltic partnership conference.
The event was combined with an internal project partner meeting which focused mainly on the Energy Efficiency Action Plans of the PLEEC cities. In order to ensure the integration of the outputs of WP 3 - 5 (technological, structural and behavioral energy efficiency) the meeting served for in-depth discussions between the PLEEC cities and the university experts on how to optimize their Action Plans.

And last but not least the Executive Board (Work Package leaders and project coordinator) met end of November in Stockholm to discuss the final strategic steps which have to be taken until the project ends. 

In the run of 2015 the parallel Work Packages 3, 4 and 5 were completed and the final reports of these Work Packages are to be released within the next weeks. On the project website www.pleecproject.eu you can find all the revent reviews and reports published so far.

It was a very busy year for all of us and we would like to take up this opportunity to thank the whole partner consortium for their efforts and activities to bring the project successfully forward! 

We have now three more months to go and are currently actively working on the organization of the PLEEC Final Conference which will take place on 8 March 2016 in Hamburg in the framework of the “International Conference on Sustainable Built Environment (SBE 16)” – a top-class scientific event on sustainable development and new concepts of sustainability in the building sector.
Kindly reserve this date in your calendar - we will keep you updated here and on the project website www.pleecproject.eu.

Cheers!