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Energy discussed between mountain and lake…

Jun 18, 2013 / Verein Alpenstadt des Jahres
The Alpstar mid-term conference took place from April 25th to 26th 2013, in the city of Grassau in the beautiful region of the Achental.
Image caption:
The entries not only feature general information about the projects but also details like objectives and activities as well as impacts on different fields of environment.
This conference, organized by the association Ökomodel Achental, had been an opportunity for the participants, project partners and other stakeholders – enterprises, policy makers, citizen, to review the progress of the project to discuss about policy requirements for energy savings and to discover concrete local achievements and projects for a sustainable and carbon neutral future.

Indeed, the aim of Alpstar project is to move towards carbon neutral Alps by making best practice minimum standard, by:
- Supporting realizations on territories enhancing energy savings and reductions in GHG emissions, trying to reduce as far as possible the running global warming,
- Building up, in these pilot regions, strategic action plans targeting carbon neutral Alps by 2050.
- Creating, promoting and facilitating the exchange of capacity building and technical information between the Alpine countries about their own actions, to move towards these ambitious goals, necessary and promising (improving employment, financial savings, …)

During the conference days, it has also been the opportunity to present some of the alpstar’s pilot actions to a large public:
- The hosting region Achental (Germany), of course, with its whole territory strategy mainly focused on the use of biomass and managed by the Ökomodel Achenta.
- The forestry valley of the Northern Goriška region (Slovenia), and its wood added value chain in order to create cheaper and free-CO2 heating and electricity.
- The Veneto region in Italia, and its small and medium enterprise network, working in a cooperative way.
- The natural regional parc of the Queyras in France : dealing with knowledge on traditional thermical building renovation while preserving traditional architecture.
- And the Pays Serre Ponçon Ubaye Durance and its strategy to reduce the electricity peak demand on winter morning, correlated to the production of artificial snow (itself an adaptation to climate change).

The internet best practice platform has been also presented. This collection of examples has been made by and for territories, associations, enterprises in the alpine space, in order to help them dealing with energy and climate issues (free online on: http://alpstar-project.eu/best-practice-plateform)

Concretely, directly on the Achental land, it had also been the occasion to discover installations of production for a greener energy (a biomass center for heating and a hydroelectric power plant) and for a better global conservation of the environment.

The project Alpstar “toward carbon neutral alps” is supported by the alpine space European program.