Marco Calderoni, Riccardo Battisti

Ambiente Italia srl

marco. calderoni@ambienteitalia. it — riccardo. battisti@ambienteitalia. it

Abstract

On January, 23rd 2008, the European Commission delivered the first draft of the Directive, where renewable heating was recognised to play a key role in the sustainable and secure energy supply in the EU.

In this scenario, the EU funded “ProSTO” project (“Best practice implementation of solar thermal obligations”), developed within the Intelligent Energy Europe programme, has the ambitious but challenging goal of acting as a reference in this process, with a special focus on solar thermal in buildings.

The project partnership, which includes Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Romania, comprises research institutes and Local Authorities, which are the main stakeholders, having the task of developing optimised “Solar Thermal Obligations” (STOs). STOs are legal provisions obligating owners of buildings to install a solar thermal system on new/renovated buildings.

First of all, ProSTO will perform a base line assessment, in order to sum up the existing experiences on STOs, together with the needs of the participating local authorities.

A STO developer toolbox will be created for both the implementation by the local authorities and the dissemination at European level.

The core activity of the project will be carried out by 20 local governments of the Region of Lazio (IT), the Cities of Lisbon (PT), Murcia (SP), Stuttgart (DE) and Giurgiu (RO). They will create show cases of best practice implementations of STOs.