EnerCoach – a digital energy accounting platform for municipalities to monitor energy consumption of public infrastructure

Countries

Luxembourg

Policy areas

Organisation name SIGI – Syndicat Intercommunal de Gestion Informatique

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Contact person: Anne Hoffmann, Director of Communications, Member of the Board of Directors

First prize winner in category Green in EPSA 2021:

EnerCoach is a user-friendly, data driven, collaborative, inter-administrative energy accounting platform, hosted centrally. Its main objective is to further encourage political leaders to prioritise climate change and reduce energy consumption in their municipalities in Luxembourg.

In its continuing efforts to reduce energy consumption and take action against climate change, the Luxembourg Government launched the national Climate Pact in 2012. The objective of this engagement was to reduce the energy consumption of municipal buildings, infrastructure, lightning and the vehicle fleet with regards to heat, fuel, electricity and water consumption. By signing the pact, the municipalities committed to implementing and using an energy accounting system for their municipal building infrastructure and equipment.

The result of this engagement was the first version of the energy accounting system, EnerCoach, subsequently replaced in 2016 by the new platform developed by SIGI – the Syndicat Intercommunal de Gestion Informatique.

The new, redesigned energy accounting system was created adopting a fully centralised approach and direct integration into the existing municipal business administration, ERP GESCOM. This enabled all stakeholders to access and exchange information through a common user-friendly platform, allowed automated and synchronised updates, and secure real-time data transfers and exchange of views between them.

Among the most important innovations of this renovated platform, there is the possibility to compare national benchmarks, to provide exchange of viewpoints, feedback and knowledge-sharing with the aim of making decisions to achieve a more sustainable country. There are also newly developed export functionalities.

Municipalities are able to inform their citizens, through individually generated energy reports, about the local efforts made to reduce municipal energy consumption and CO2 emissions. These communication exchanges, based on transparent and graphically illustrated data, contribute to increasing awareness about energy topics and consumption among the citizens. The citizens are thus influenced and encouraged to make efforts to optimise their individual energy sources.

The availability of transparent and reliable data on energy consumption helped the ministry and the government to grant municipal subsidies, supporting them in their energy optimisation efforts. Furthermore, the centralised approach resulted in a reduction of administrative workload and costs for all involved stakeholders.

The EnerCoach platform design has proved to be a fortunate and sustainable model for Luxembourg. It is a leading example of how the National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP), drafted by the Luxembourgish government following the Paris Agreement, has been successfully transitioned into a national political government initiative, resulting in the Climate Pact 1.0 and ultimately being accepted and implemented at the local political level by 102 municipalities.

The digitised process via the EnerCoach platform, including all entities involved and taking into consideration their needs as well as the legal and technical requirements, contributed to the acceptance and success of this climate initiative.

Therefore, the Climate Pact 2.0 was extended by the government from 2021 to 2030, and a more mature EnerCoach platform is again the central element of this new national government programme.

Based on the positive experience resulting from the collaboration with SIGI and its digitised solution EnerCoach, myenergy – the national agency for the promotion of the transition to sustainable energy – recommended SIGI to the Ministry of Housing to support ministerial staff with a similar digitised central platform for the Pacte Logement (Housing Pact).

The platform was available to all participating stakeholders by 2017, in under one year, allowing municipalities to report accurate and complete data to myenergy.

Since the implementation of EnerCoach in 2017, data analysis of a three-year period showed very encouraging results nationwide:

  • an increase of 10% in buildings monitored after the municipal building registry was integrated in the platform;
  • a decrease of 19% in overall energy consumption;
  • a 23% drop in street lightning electricity consumption;
  • increase of 2.4 % in wood – used for pellet heating – a clear shift from non-renewable towards renewable sources.

Through administrative simplification, the process was streamlined and the workload for myenergy and other involved stakeholders contracted by 50%. The centralised EnerCoach platform eliminated time-consuming software crashes that had been due to poor technical compatibilities. Incoherent encoding of data disappeared when individual reports and evaluations where automatically updated in the platform, thus reducing data processing costs.

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