The Innoveas Partnership has addressed the many challenges that energy culture and energy transition often have to face, focusing specifically on issues relating to the low uptake of energy audit practices by European Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs).
SMEs have a crucial role to play in achieving the goals of the green transition. Energy efficiency is just one of the many measures companies need to take. For the vast majority of small companies, a business logic for adoption based solely on cost savings will not provide sufficient motivation for change. The energy auditing is an important part of the adoption process; however the analysis conducted so far has insisted on the need to change the narrative around the energy audit and reinvent the auditing business.
Generally, SMEs are very diverse entities and each SME has specific problems in developing a strategy and implementing energy efficiency programmes. Each business experiences a unique combination of barriers, even though operating in the same industry and in the same geographic location.
Most of the barriers, not only the external ones, are connected to the economic, financial and social environment in which the SME operates. The initiation or strengthening of an improvement process towards the energy transition is often not hindered by a single barrier in itself. What is decisive is the accumulation of many barriers that the entrepreneur has to face, more or less simultaneously.
Therefore, capacity-building activities, albeit with various facets and depending on the various contexts and types of SMEs, should deal with all the real and potential barriers in an integrated way.
Furthermore, we will implement a “multi-actors” approach in capacity building and awareness-raising.
SMEs, as well as energy auditors, policymakers, financial institutions' officials, industrial associations' representatives will be involved in order to create an “enabling environment” that will allow to implement effectively energy saving measures. These actors have already been involved in several dissemination and informative events, and will soon be engaged in the activities of the “European Alliance for Energy Efficiency in SMEs”.
