Jul 5 2006
Led by the Basque Energy Authority (EEE/EVE), the local authority councils of Bakio and Derio (province of Bizkaia), Bergara (Gipuzkoa) and Agurain (Araba province) are the Basque towns taking part in the European ENERinTOWN project, the general aim of which is to reduce energy consumption in a total of 100 public buildings. Twelve of these, belonging to the 4 mentioned Basque municipalities, will have a novel system of monitoring gas and electricity consumption installed. This information will be sent to a central server and will enable the detection of anomalies and the application of corrective measures. The European Commission has calculated that the project will involve an energy saving of 5%; in some cases reaching 15%. It is an application that would mean an increase in efficiency and the Rational Use of Energy.
Each of the 8 regions participants in the ENERinTOWN project put forward the names of four representative localities where the new monitoring systems are to be installed in three of their public buildings, in each case. In the case of the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC), a representative selection from the three territories or provinces within the BAC was put forward, and which also represent different climatic zones in such a way that they can analyse the differences in consumption between one and the other.
Bakio, Derio, Bergara and Agurain have chosen buildings such as the Town Hall, the municipal school, the elderly people’s residence, theatres and tourist offices as ideal buildings for carrying out monitoring with the aim of reducing their consumption.
The procedure followed involved the installation of an ongoing monitoring system for the consumption of both electrical energy and of gas. To this end, all the electric meters and some of the gas meters have to be changed in order for the data to be recorded automatically. This information will be sent every 15 minutes by Internet to a centralised server which will receive information from the series of 12 buildings throughout the four boroughs and, by means of novel software, a number of different parameters are analysed.
With these analyses, the system itself can signal alarms to the Council so that the Local Authority can take relevant corrective action. Each municipality has assigned a local government officer to be the Municipal Energy Manager, who is charged with the responsibility of generating system alarms together with EEE/EVE, and to introduce the necessary action to correct the deviation.
All the participating regions in the programme will have this monitoring system installed in order to comply with the energy-saving commitment made with the European Commission – calculated to be 5% with regards to current consumption, although in some cases it is anticipated that this figure could be even greater and energy consumption savings could be up to 15%.