As previously announced, the Municipality of Mnihla, one of the Tunisian partners of SOLE project, has appointed an expert to produce an energy efficiency report on the municipal building. According to the preliminary analysis of the energy consumption, which has just been released, the building is characterized by an average performance in terms of energy efficiency. It covers a land of 1950m2: of its 140 staff members, only 6% use the building on a daily basis. The average cost of energy consumed by the administration of the municipality per month is around an average of 2,050 DT/month (613 Euro/month). The Municipality needs to consider energy management as a key component for controlling consumption costs.

A set of technical failures were identified as important to address in order to improve energy consumption, which are:

• the poor insulation of the building;
• poor energy management of equipment;
• the use of oil bath heating;
• individual air conditioning with a lot of energy loss
• the 0.6 mm glazing which causes considerable energy loss.

The municipal use of heating system is from December to February and the average yearly heating consumption is of 23KW. The use of Air Conditioning (A/C) is from June to October, with an average yearly consumption of 75KW. 

Some of the foreseen energy efficiency activities include:

• use of an unused well, for garden irrigation using a solar powered water pump;
• adding an energy management system and changing the electricity distribution board and adding an electric backup system;
• studying the possibility of double glazing for all windows and changing doors for better isolation;
• replacing all lighting systems with LED;
• using the available surface area to install solar energy panels;
• replacing old A/C.

The final energy efficiency report for the building of the Municipality of Mnihla should be ready by end of January 2023. Once the report is released, calls will be published to acquire all necessary equipment to proceed to the energy requalification intervention’s implementation phase. The call will be open for 1 month, hence the intervention’s implementation should start in the month of March 2023.