Climate Ready Barcelona and Powgen, presented at the EPAH Conference 2024

On October 15 and 16 we participated in the Energy Poverty Advisory Hub (EPAH) Conference in Barcelona presenting two of the international projects in which the ABD Group is working.

Climate Ready Barcelona

On the first day we participated in the panel “Artificial Intelligence and Energy Poverty: Innovative Solutions and Strategic Alliances” which brought together experts from various sectors to discuss how artificial intelligence can contribute to detecting and combating energy poverty. The speakers highlighted the need to address this issue from a multidimensional approach, including social services, health, housing and urban planning.

Within the framework of this conference, the Climate Ready Barcelona project was presented. It seeks to support Barcelona’s citizens and public institutions in anticipating and adapting to the effects of climate change and the related energy crisis.

As representative of the Barcelona City Council, Patrici Hernández, emphasized the importance of this holistic perspective to avoid the failure of public policies and shared the role of the Energy Advice Centers (EAC) as an information and support service to prevent and reduce energy poverty. For his part, the co-director of Ecoserveis, Aniol Esquerra, presented My Energy webapp, funded by the EU – NextGenerationEU, which is being developed within the project to facilitate and improve the attention offered from the EACs. The director of BEE Group in CIMNE, Jordi Cipriano, showed the climate vulnerability map that uses different data to see how climate change affects the different areas of the city of Barcelona and foresee with Artificial Intelligence (AI) the impacts on the population in order to plan public policies.

The conference was concluded by Aránzazu Herráez, head of data protection and personal data management in AI projects of the Getafe City Council, who presented the EPIU Getafe project. Herráez emphasized the management of personal data within an appropriate legal framework.

In the conclusions, they stressed the importance of offering personalized attention, harmonizing data, empowering citizens and promoting municipal and regional collaboration to effectively address fuel poverty.

Climate Ready Barcelona is funded by the Local Governments for Sustainability from ICLEI with the support of Google.org and it has Ecoserveis, ABD, Ajuntament de Barcelona, CIMNE and Bitgenoma as partner organizations.

POWGEN project

On the second day of the conference, we took part of the panel “Increasing Inclusion and Addressing Energy Poverty and Green Transition” presenting the POWGEN project as an example of an initiative that promotes labor inclusion of people at risk of exclusion while addressing energy poverty and facilitating energy transition.

Lara Rot, project manager at ABD, presented POWGEN, which aims to promote the inclusion of migrant people in the renewable energy and rehabilitation sectors, as well as to promote inclusive and diverse workplaces. Federica Giardina, social scientist at Ecoserveis, then presented the 10 good practices of POWGEN, including training in diverse skills, a European agreement for a real integration of green jobs, the exploration of more diverse career paths and the inclusion of education as a pathway to residency, regularization of foreign workers to avoid labor exploitation, a multi-stakeholder approach to support the most vulnerable, specific support for immigrant women, language training and other measures such as promoting gender equality in the renewable energy sector and ensuring stable funding to fight energy poverty.

Carles Xavier Pelegrino Moreno, Director General of Social Services of the Generalitat de Catalunya, introduced the panel by showing the actions promoted by the Catalan government to tackle energy poverty, and Mònica Plana, Director of ABD’s Inclusion Area, closed the session by explaining the 3 levels of support of the Energy Advice Centers (EACs), which include information, advice and home visits.

The panel was moderated by Francesco Camonita, Head of Policies and Projects of the Intermediterranean Commission of the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR).

POWGEN, funded by the AMIF-2023 program of the European Comission, is coordinated by ABD in collaboration with Ecoserveis, CRESCER,  PRO ARBEIT, Cidis onlus, Regione Campania and the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR).