GOOD PRACTICE EXAMPLE

Country:	Germany, Lower Saxony
Product group:	Green electricity and Office Devices
Name of the institution:	City of Emden
CO2 reduction:	1,000,000 tons/year

Overview

The City of Emden is far sophisticated in the scope of renewable energy and was awarded the “regenerative capital of Europe” in 2005. With the mix of different energy sources the city Emden is able to cover the whole energy consumption with own means. Furthermore the city uses these activities within the Agenda 21, and promotes them to be copied by other companies as well.

Institutional details

With a total population of almost 52,000 inhabitants Emden is the smallest urban district of Lower Saxony. Emden is also an important seaport, which is the reason for many larger industrial enterprises to settle their business there. Now already Emden has widely exceeded the goal set in the Kyoto Protocol to reduce the CO2 reduction by 20 % until 2020, leading the way in Germany as well as in Europe in using alternative energies. With the implementation of renewable energy sources the city of Emden could reduce its CO2 emssions by 2 tons per year and per head.

Procurement process

The organisation of the procurement is decentrally organized but acts according to central procurement regulations. This belongs to the concrete mission statement “klimaschutzfreundliche Stadt Emden”. In the call for tender the city Emden underlies the tendering directives of the public authorities as well as intern directives which prescribe the adherence of different environmental protection and energy efficiency criteria.

Measures

In compliance with the criteria of the Energy Star, TCO and Eco labels, a binding condition for the procurement of office devices like PCs, monitors, printers, copier and fax machines is established. The city of Emden does not call for a tender for office devices but purchases under consideration of these label criteria. The city has already exchanged 50 % of 500 monitors and 90 % of 500 Personal Computer according to these criteria.

Emden purchases 15.9 percent of green power from regional renewable energy sources. The utility of Emden (Stadtwerke Emden GmbH) owns a wind park in Wybelsumer Polden, a biomass co-generation plant and a photovoltaic station on the noise barrier of the autobahn. This regionally produced power is not labelled in a special way.

Success

With the exchange of the monitors and PCs in the workstations, Emden could decrease the energy consumption by 51,000 kWh, which is equivalent to 40 %. All in all, the city saves about 60,000 tons of CO2 per year.