The idea for this project arose when several businesses of the target subsectors, associated to some members of this consortium, asked them for technical support to control their increasing costs in energy. Those targets are ARABLE CROPS DRYING AND STORAGE (NACE 1.6) MEAT AND POULTRY (NACE 10.1) DAIRY (NACE 10.5) TRANSFORMATION OF FRUIT AND VEGETABLES (NACE 10.3). The introduction of most advanced but proven technologies was not sufficiently integrated on these subsectors due to the intrinsic weaknesses of this kind of industries, isolated places far from the industrial states, heterogeneously management of agricultural raw materials, temporality, and so on. The tackle of this challenge is important both for industrial sector and the rural areas within they are located.
The project objective is to reduce energy consumption, by implementing cost-effective energy solutions, at a short term in a range between 10% and 15% directly in 81 businesses. This reduction should be achieved without any decrease in the production capacity of the companies and maintaining good socioeconomic and environmental conditions. For reaching these objectives, the project will work with the uptake of specific and cross-cutting innovative technologies and techniques, whose efficacy has been proven in other industrial sectors different from the agro-food sector, but not being familiar or rarely implemented in the agro-food sector.
On the other hand, the project pursues larger savings in the medium term with new affordable intelligent energy solutions, specifically by proving in operational environment the “Collaborative Energy Management Systems”. It will take advantage of complementarities and synergies among analysed industrial sites with similar characteristics or proximity and will use them for the improvement of their joint energy efficiency. For this purpose, 6 pilot industrial clusters in 5 different countries will be set up and uses for assessing the improvements in overall energy consumptions and its associated costs, that could be achieved by using common procedures based on the ISO 50.001 standard and supported by a specific software developed by the project.
Additionally, the overall investment and savings achieved by the project are 83.05 GWh and 31.47 M€ invested. These figures include the savings achieved by the implementation of energy efficiency measures (57.30 GWh) and by the implementation of renewable energy systems for self-producing energy needs (25.75 GWh). Also, the mentioned overall figures included the investments carried out during project lifetime (22.75 M€) and the planned investments that will be executive in the short term (8.71 M€).
