“A ghost is walking around in Europe and the world. The ghost of climate change. Year by year, mankind is releasing more greenhouse gases. In the long run, they are warming our planet. They let ice mountains melt, raise the sea level and make the oceans sour.” This is a quote from the applications for the two previous projects on the subject Power Saving Check from 2014 and 2018 and its contents are still valid. Only now, the world policy seems to have understood that there is the need for an extreme rerouting in order to stop the climate change. Not least, the citizens in many countries contributed to that. Citizens who are interested in inheriting the coming generations a liveable planet which was also reflected by the numerous activities of the Fridays for Future movement in Europe.
Europe, particularly the European Commission, has a pioneering task in the global climate policy. Based on the European Green Deal as a central part, Europe shall become the first climate-neutral continent until 2050. It contains a row of measures extending to all economic fields – traffic, energy, agriculture and buildings as well as the steel, cement, ICT, textile and chemical industry – and that shall lead until 2030 to a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 55 per cent in comparison with 1990, to a raising of the share of energy from renewable sources to at least 32 per cent and to an increase of energy efficiency by at least 32.5 per cent. Since the energy consumption of industry, traffic and buildings is nearly equally high in the partner countries, those sectors obtain on the other way around an almost equal potential to save energy. Apart from the increasing of the efficiency in all energy applications and in the energy transmission as well as the growing replacing of fossil energy sources with regenerative energy sources, the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of private households and public buildings need to get into the focus more strongly now. This gets already obvious because in 2018 private households of the EU emitted 775.5 million tonnes of CO2 which corresponds to a share of 19.5 per cent of the entire CO2 emissions (Eurostat).
However, climate protection is not the only argument for a new dealing with energy. Since 2008 latest there is another one. The growing demand for oil, natural gas and water on one hand and the awareness for the finiteness of these resources on the other hand will drive the energy and water prices by trend in enormous heights´. The energy prices, for example, have been increasing in all partner countries (except for HU) during the last five years – even if moderately. Due to the higher CO2 pricing and the resulting CO2 cost allocation to the energy prices, this trend will even be strengthened. And this will affect all citizens. Especially households with low income will be struggling with that and will not be able to compensate the increasing prices with a reduction of their own electricity and water consumption. They do also not obtain the financial means to invest in electricity, energy and water saving devices. For the mentioned reasons, it is time to pick all citizens up and take them on the way towards a climate-neutral Europe. This is not failing because of their missing will – as the experiences from “Power Saving Check – Coming of Age” confirmed again, but because of a lack of information and guidance. This is the starting point of our project “Power Saving Check goes Citizens”. We would like to contribute concretely to the achievement of the European climate protection targets and aim therefore at:
All this will finally lead to significant savings of energy and water as well as to the reduction of CO2 emissions in private households and public buildings. In addition, households save money. More information can be found on Facebook.
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