Consorci de la Ribera, partner of the ENI CBC Med funded ‘ESMES’ project launched a contest on energy efficiency among 9 public schools of La Ribera, in the Spanish region of Valencia

The main objective of this contest is to raise awareness in the educational sector of the importance of assuming sustainable energy behaviors. The key to this contest is that a group of students from the school will be encouraged to reduce their energy consumption by using their own energy data. This will be achieved through a change in the general behavior of the schools’ attendees.

This group of students, which will be trained on the required energy equipment, will have to design an action plan based on the current situation with the aim of involving the entire school community in the common goal of improving behavior, and to become more responsible with the environment. The first phase of this competition, which began last week, is the installation of these energy equipment in the schools, teach the students the basic concepts of energy, climate change awareness and strategies of energy saving for schools. These training sessions will be carried out by technicians of the Energy Area of the Consorci de la Ribera.

The other fundamental pillar of the contest is the installation of a data acquisition system in each center that participates. These systems will automatically register the data of electric consumption collected in the schools and upload it to an online platform shared by all the project partners. With this intelligent registration, the detailed data on electricity consumption of each participating school will be available and can be compared with those of previous courses, among the participating schools of Ribera and also with the participating schools of the rest of the project's partner countries.

The criteria to announce the winner of this competition will be comparing the measured energy consumption based on the baseline data and the data collected after implementation of the designed plan.

The schools participating in this energy contest are the following: CEIP Les Comes (L'Alcúdia), CEIP Sanchis Guarner (La Pobla Llarga) CEIP Emili Lluna (Alginet), CEIP El Castell (Corbera), CEIP Fèlix Olmos (Favara) CEIP Sta Maria d'Aigües Vives (La Barraca d'Aigües Vives), CEIP Sant Blai (Llaurí), CEIP L'Alcocera (Polinyà del Xúquer) and CEIP Balmes (Guadassuar).

The total number of schools involved are 34, divided among the regions of the partners participating in the project which, in addition to the Consorci de la Ribera are: the Istituto per la Cooperazione Universitaria Onlus (ICU), from Italy, the German Jordanian University (GJU), from Jordan, the municipality of Alcamo, from Italy, the National Agency for Energy Conservation (ANME), from Tunisia and the Lebanese Centre for Energy Conservation (LCEC) from Lebanon.