CoME EASY developed tools for progressive municipal energy policy

At the European level, ENCO worked with the CoME EASY project from May 2018 until September 2021 to harmonise the European Energy Award (eea) with other tried and tested energy and climate policy management initiatives. This project aimed to provide communities with powerful tools for effective energy management to support them in reaching their goals.

Cities and communities play a fundamental role in the global battle against climate change and the successful transition to clean forms of energy. Municipal authorities work closely with residents and are therefore ideally placed to identify local opportunities and implement relevant measures. Also, national energy and climate objectives cannot be met without strong commitment at the local and community level. Cities and communities therefore need to emerge as leaders in implementing sustainable energy policies – and they need to be supported in this challenge. While there have already been various initiatives providing this type of support, they have all used different approaches, referenced different targets, addressed different sectors and delivered different support structures.

CoME EASY was designed to synthesise the various existing methodologies in order to bundle the strengths of selected, internationally tried and tested initiatives. To do this, the project promoted the development of tools which connect and harmonise the Covenant of Mayors (an initiative of the European Commission) and the European Energy Award above all, but which also considered ISO standards and Smart Cities and Communities. The goal of the project was to ensure that local authorities are able to draw on the value added by these various initiatives at little additional expense to achieve even stronger results in their energy and climate policies.

In the first stage of the project, 18 ambassador communities from all over Europe did work with CoME EASY tools to test them for their added value, usability and user friendliness. The final tools have been made available to interested communities free of charge via the open CoME EASY platform.

The project is being implemented over a period of 41 months. CoME EASY was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

As part of the project, we were tasked with the following:

• Development of a comparative study and analysis of European climate policy management initiatives (including CoM, EEA, ISO standards, Smart Cities and Communities, among others) as a basis for developing the new tools
• Support for and coordination of participating ambassador communities in Switzerland
• Lead management of project communications. Coordination and production of communication tools such as the project website etc.