The lead partner of this process is Manchester Knowledge Capital (MKC) with support from Genoa and Euro cities, a non-for profit network that will support and guide us with their expert knowledge in this area.

To gather the data needed to create the Knowledge Base each of the Partners has to collate case studies highlighting areas of good practice (and sometimes bad) in terms of new approaches to areas such as, energy efficiency, transport, citizen/business engagement, street lighting, low power IT initiatives and so on. These along with experience gained from study visits to the 6 participating city regions, and new knowledge developed as a result of the project, will be collated to form a “Case Study Matrix”, i.e. the Knowledge Base.

This task is scheduled to be complete by November 2008. The next phase to follow this will be identifying the best practices from the Knowledge Base and using these to form the first set of pilot action plans for the participating city-regions to adopt.

So watch this space…

The study visits are going to be carried out as part of the PEPESEC project to allow all the project partners to share their knowledge and experiences of local energy planning, using different techniques to involve local citizens, politicians, market actors and other stakeholders and anything else the partners feel could be effective transferable “eco-friendly” techniques to be used within the participating city-regions and ultimately the whole of Europe.

This visit will be hosted by our two Swedish partners:

• The City of Malmö, a city with advanced expertise and highly experienced with the concept of producing “Local Energy Plans” and supporting the emergence of “Sustainable Energy Communities” (SEC) within its region.
• Skåne Energy Agency (SEA), an agency created to support and give guidance to the Skåne region environmental challenges such as introducing effective energy management practices, the concept of Sustainability and offer services based on the local needs of the region and so on.

The objective of the Swedish training seminar will involve The City of Malmö, SEA and a some representatives from Eon Heat, sharing there expertise on energy planning and its processes (Including different I.T. methodologies), Sustainable City Development (e.g. Experiences from generating Malmo’s Western Harbour Bo01 SEC) and study visits to see some of Malmö’s excellent examples of different Renewable Energy Sources (RES) being facilitated, such as solar energy, green roofs, biogas, hydrogen gas and so on. The results of this should be the starting point for the creation of the projects “Knowledge Base”; a catalogue of Best Practice examples from around Europe.

For further information on Sweden’s Sustainable Energy practices etc please use the following links:

• SECURE Project, previous European Project Malmö was involved with
• The City of Malmo
• Skåne Energy Agency
• Eon Energy Company
• Skåne Region