The small show which way Europe should walk.

The RES (renewable energy sources) Champions League announced its winners for the second time, this year in Prague. The RES Champions League is a network of national RES leagues, which aims at creating a positive renewable energy competition between European cities, towns and villages. According to the RES ranking, strong cities and towns are found in Germany, Italy and the Check Republic, but also other participating countries like Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and France are showing successful and innovative example to Europe.

Besides celebrating the winners, the RES Champions League conference provided an experience ex-change, where various RES solutions used by towns and cities were presented during the conference. As being organized in Prague, it also brought a reminder about the current Czech government policy, which, in comparison with the EU accent on the green energy, is driving in opposite direction.

The final rankings can be found on RES Champions League home page. A great hurray and respect should be directed to these cities and towns for taking an entrepreneurial grip on the matter, supporting the development of renewable energy sources on a concrete level and at the same time showing direction to whole Europe. It is with thrill that we can wait and expect big cities, even metropolises to being able to implement similar solutions in a somewhat bigger scale to underpin the result of climate change mitigation even more.

CHAMP countries are already represented
CLER (France) co-ordinates the project, and the following organisations function as project partners: Solarthemen in Germany, LEA in Czech republic, PNEC in Poland, ABEA in Bulgaria, EKKE in Hungary, Legambiente in Italy, Climate Alliance in Germany, DUH in Germany

The competition is targeted at cities and towns working for the development of renewable energies. All CHAMP partners (besides Finland) can already participate, as they are represented as a nation in RES CL. It is also possible, even desirable to set up a new National RES Champion Leagues! To know more about the competition that will certainly be open again next year, please visit the web site.

The principles of the RES Champions League:
One index: based on installed power (or area) per inhabitant
Two energies: solar (photovoltaic and thermal) and wood (heat)
One general ranking (all sizes) and three divisions:
- small cities and towns (between 5,000 and 19,999 inhabitants)
- medium cities and towns (between 20,000 and 99,999 inhabitants)
- large cities and towns (more than 100,000 inhabitants)

Source: RES CL
Picture source: RES CL

Partnership is the key

If you want to be incrementally better: Be competitive.
If you want to be exponentially better: Be cooperative.

That's how the CHAMP Project Manager Pekka Salminen summed up the benefits of the newly established European Partnership for Integrated Sustainability Management. Like we wrote earlier in this blog, the European Partnership was succesfully launched in connection with the Resilient Cities 2011 conference in Bonn on June 4th.

The European Partnership was established by the CHAMP project consortium partners and new national training hubs in four other European countries or regions. The new signatories of the Partnership are SES Efficiency, and Observatory for Sustainability from Spain, the Forum of Adriatic and Ionian Cities, Sendzimir Foundation from Poland and the regional training center for local public administration Sibiu. Poland, Romania, Spain and Adriatic and Ionian region. The aim is to develop common capacity building services for local and regional authorities. This is done through National Training Hubs in each country, with a special focus on an Integrated Management System for sustainability.

We are currently searching for new national training hubs in all European countries. If your organisation might be interested, read more on the CHAMP project website!