Promoting Energy Efficiency within the EU-Russia Energy Dialogue

Within the EU-Russia Energy Dialogue, the Delegation of the European Commission to Russia and the Federal Ministry of Industry and Energy are starting a euro 2.8 million project that aims to increase investments in energy efficiency in Russia. The project will be officially launched on 16 November, 2006, at 15h00, at the Delegation of the European Commission to Russia (Kadashevskaya Nab., 14/1).

The project will run until December 2007 and will work closely with the administrations in Kaliningrad, Arkhangelsk and Astrakhan regions. The focus is mainly on the development of concrete financing mechanisms for energy efficiency projects.

In each region there is a special target sector: in Kaliningrad a demonstration project will be developed for the industry sector, in Arkhangelsk the focus is on the public and housing sector, while in Astrakhan the possibilities for energy efficiency in the electricity generation and transmission sector will be investigated.

The results will be full economic and technical feasibility reports for each region that can be used to attract financing from a variety of sources. The resulting financing mechanism(s) will also be used for replication in other regions of Russia.

Another result of the project will be the development of guidelines to improve energy efficiency policy in the three regions, as well as guidelines for the federal ministry's energy efficiency policy.

In the course of the project a range of workshops and seminars will be organized where the results of the activities will be discussed by EU and Russian experts, high-level officials, and other stakeholders, such as enterprises, commercial banks and international financing institutions.

COWI, a Danish consultancy, is the lead partner in a consortium that will implement the project. The other consortium participants are consultant companies CENEf (Russia), SWECO (Sweden), Mott McDonald (UK), and the Technical University of Athens (Greece).

Representatives of the Ministry of Industry and Energy of the Russian Federation, the Delegation of the European Commission to the Russian Federation, international organizations and business will participate in the launch of the project.