Abstract
Managing energy use by municipalities should be an important part of local energy and climate policy. The ISO 50001 standard constitutes an internationally recognized catalogue of requirements for systematic energy management. Currently, this standard is mostly implemented by companies. Our study presents an approach where consultants supported 28 European municipalities in establishing energy management systems. A majority (71%) of these municipalities had achieved ISO 50001 certification by the end of our study. We also conducted two surveys to learn more about motivations and challenges when it comes to establishing municipal energy management systems. We found that organizational challenges and resource constraints were the most important topics in this regard. Based on the experiences in our study we present lessons learned regarding supporting municipalities in establishing energy management systems.
Highlights
Municipalities are widely seen as important actors when it comes to mitigating climate change
The energy management system (EnMS) allowed Montauban to have a clear organization in terms of energy management, including roles, reporting, and projections, and to identify numerous improvement actions
Given that 28 municipalities were working on establishing an ISO 50001 energy management system during the project, this equals a response rate of 82%
Summary
Municipalities are widely seen as important actors when it comes to mitigating climate change. Wulandari et al [16] discussed motivations for establishing an ISO 50001 energy management system, difficulties, and benefits based on a survey of 57 Spanish companies They identified increasing energy efficiency, raising employee awareness for energy-use behavior, and the leadership’s initiative as the most important motivations for introducing an ISO 50001 EnMS. To their respondents, data collection and management as well as limited financial resources were the hardest difficulties [16]. The first main objective of this study was to test whether a substantial number of municipalities could establish an energy management system fit to be certified according to the ISO50001:2018 standard with the help of external assistance. Widely discussed in earlier scientific studies on energy management [4,8]
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