Energy efficiency: how to create a virtuous circle

In an effort to break the status quo, energy efficiency champions, users of solutions and innovative companies/ start-ups, launched the Movin’On community of interest on Energy Efficiency during the Movin’On Digital Meetings in June 2020. The aim is to bring together key stakeholders from energy efficiency to discuss and drive concrete initiatives. This first workshop held on 8 October gathered about 30 experts from 25 companies to identify tangible actions to scale up energy efficiency solutions.

BNP Paribas, ENGIE, Michelin and Solar Impulse are taking a stand to fast-forward the reduction of energy consumption and reinvest the savings it will generate in energy transition. This reduction is crucial as 40% of energy produced is wasted, which is a financial loss for companies and has a dramatic impact on the environment by increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

However, despite a growing awareness of this environmental issue, scale up of energy efficiency solutions is still difficult and many obstacles remain on the way.

Concrete solutions already exist: the Solar Impulse Foundation has created the label “1000 efficient solutions” to stamp solutions that are beneficial to our planet. Among these solutions, in collaboration with BNP Paribas, Solar Impulse has published a list of those focusing on energy efficiency.

One concrete use case of what the community of interest wants to encourage is the existing joint initiative between Engie and Michelin on Les Gravanches, Michelin’s first zero-emission industrial site, which was started in 2018.

This launch was the first milestone of our actions to come as a community of interest: it is not a one shot initiative but we aim to nourish long-term projects with tangible results in the future. To that extent, experts gathered around key topics for energy efficiency acceleration to discuss and to foster concrete outputs, including: 

Buildings / Real Estate initiatives:

• Investigate ways to converge ambitions of key stakeholders (investor, user, solution provider) to foster energy efficient buildings
• Explore “the building in 20 years, in 50 years”
• Share data base of potential initiatives with high ROI
  
  

Industry:

• Create an “expert network” on Industrial Energy Efficiency
• Connect innovations / startup initiatives with big corporates (through dedicated webinars?)
  
  

Digital sobriety:

• Share experiences / best practices on Digital Sobriety between companies
• Create a referential of solutions/ label of digital sobriety measures
• Investigate “index” to guide choice on digital appliances
  
  

Financing:

• Explore financing solutions for Energy Efficiency projects addressing identified pain points (e.g. size of projects, payback, risk…)
  
  

Common initiatives:

• Share videos of concrete use cases
• Complete existing Solar Impulse repository of Energy Efficiency solutions

These initiatives are bound to evolve, just as our community of interest. The next step of our collaboration will be taking place early 2021 to make an update on initiatives. Following this, there will be a presentation on achievements during the year at the Movin’On Summit in June 2021.

To find out more, watch the virtual working sessions led by BNP Paribas in partnership with Solar Impulse Foundation, Michelin and Engie in the framework of Movin’On ecosystem.