News from EKOenergy

Edition 63  -  21st April 2016

Lappeenranta, a city of 60.000 inhabitants in Eastern Finland, switches to EKOenergy.

Mayor Kimmo Jarva explains: "By committing to using EKOenergy, the city wants to be an example for businesses and citizens in our area. At the same time we want to make another step in toward reaching our climate targets: a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of 80% by 2030 (compared to 2007 levels)." 

Let's encourage cities and municipalities all over Europe (and beyond) to follow this great example.

Lappeenranta is also the home town of the Lappeenranta University of Technology, which hosts a famous research centre on solar economy.

In our newest video, we explain to you in 48 seconds who we are and what are doing. With subtitles in 9 languages.

Click here to watch the video on Youtube.

More videos are on the way! We are finalising a Russian presentation about electricity tracking and ecolabeling, as well as a video about volunteering for EKOenergy. Follow us on Youtube if you don't want to miss these.

And for those who prefer to have things on paper: we have updated one of our leaflets in Czech, English, French, German and Russian.

On 28th April we are giving a presentation about renewable electricity at the "LEED in Europe Technical Meeting". The Westin Grand Berlin hotel, where the event will take place, will use EKOenergy during the conference.

Apart from encouraging more green building experts to join us in our efforts for a 100% renewable world, we will also use the opportunity to brainstorm about how to best fulfil LEED's criteria for non-electric energy use.

For more information about the conference and for registration, click here.

For those who cannot make it, see also our online course at the website of the USGBC. The course is available in English, French and German.

"I see EKOenergy as a huge possibility for consumers to vote with their wallets by making sustainable decisions in their electricity purchases"

Jasper Pääkkönen, actor.

Through the sales of EKOenergy, we collect money which we use to finance a number of different environmental projects. 

Last year we donated €28,000 to the Dutch organisation Hivos, for their Sumba campaign. Sumba is a medium sized Island in Indonesia. Hivos and their local partners launched a plan to make the whole island renewable. Our contribution has been used to install solar installation on 2 schools in the remote Kataka area. Yesterday we received the first pictures of the installation.

Earlier this year we donated €50,000 to Virtavesien hoitoyhdistys ry (Virho) for its project plan to restore Vihti-river’s spawning conditions for salmon on  a river in Southern Finland. These works started last weekend.

Thank you to all EKOenergy consumers! More of this to come.

In the last few months a record number of electricity suppliers and traders signed our License Agreement. Eleven, in eleven weeks. Especially in Germany, sellers and traders are finding their way to EKOenergy. Six of the new licensees are from Germany. Apart from that we also welcomed 2 Italians, a Latvian, a British and an international seller based in the United States.

And more are on their way!

This makes EKOenergy even more available, in a growing number of countries. This is good news for committed electricity consumers and of course for the environment.
 

As always, a lot of things going on at the secretariat.
- We are developing an ecolabel for biogas and district heating. Thoughts, ideas and partners welcome.
-  We gave a presentation about climate change, renewable energy and EKOenergy, at a local refugee centre. We are also actively looking for partners in Arab speaking countries.
-  Eight of our current volunteers will leave us during the summer. We have submitted new EVS (European Voluntary Service) project proposals and have started to recruit new volunteers.
- We are recording the voiceover for the Russian version of our course "Green electricity for LEED and carbon accounting".
- We are preparing two ambitious campaigns in cooperation with the Finnish branch of Protect Our Winters and with the Finnish Energy Renovation (Energiaremontti).
- And much more.

Earlier this week the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) launched its flagship publication, the Global Wind Report. It turns out that Poland is one of the European countries where most new wind capacity was installed in 2015. Poland ranks second after Germany, above both France and the UK.

And at the same time, the coal industry is feeling the heat; Last year Poland's three biggest mining firms: Kompania Weglowa, the listed JSW, and KHW, as well as three state-run power producers which burn the mines' coal booked a net loss of almost 2.5 billion euro (See the article Poland feels the pain of its love affair with coal, on Reuters).

Picture: WindEurope