On Friday April 15th, DNV Climate Change & Environmental Services organised a half-day workshop on “Energy Culture”. The event took place at the Norwegian Embassy in Brussels as part of the European Sustainable Energy Week.
Energy Culture which is the combination of all aspects influencing the energy behaviour of the members of a community, is generally seen as holding the key to a significant fraction of the untapped potential of energy efficiency. While it has been studied to some degree for households, Energy Culture in a corporate setting is an emerging topic that is starting to receive the attention that it deserves. Nevertheless, even for leading enterprises, establishing and implementing a systematic and successful approach remains difficult.
DNV’s workshop aimed at mapping the current understanding of Energy Culture and at creating an opportunity to share and discuss experiences.
A presentation by Jens Christen Rolfsen Jens Christen Rolfsen (DNV Risk Management and Corporate Responsibility, Transportation Norway) set the stage by looking at the experience in Safety Culture and addressed the issue whether these lessons learned can be extrapolated to Energy Culture. Next, Mieke Dams Mieke Dams (DNV Climate Change & Environmental Services, Energy Efficiency Center, Belgium) introduced DNV’s newly developed metrics for the assessment of the maturity of the Energy Culture in enterprises. A final presentation was given by Simon Schillebeeckx (BECO, Belgium) and looked into changing the energy culture. After a short break, the topic was debated further during an interactive panel discussion with the above experts, complemented by Charles-Henri Bourgois, expert on energy efficiency at Factor4. This highly animated session with enthusiastic interjections from many participants confirmed the interest in Energy Culture.
In total, more than 30 representatives from the European Commission, industry, public authorities, and the press attended the workshop. Their active participation and feedback clearly underlined the success of the event. According to one consultant for the European Parliament, DNV’s Energy Culture workshop was the most interesting and hands-on event of the entire week!
Datum: dinsdag 12 juli 2011