Potential in GHG emissions abatement through an effective energy policy: the Reggio Emilia case

Enhancing the buildings energy performance is one of the key actions that should be pursued to achieve the Kyoto target. In Italy, energy requirements of the residential sector, in fact, represent about forty percent of the overall energy balance. The majority of this consumption could be avoided by simply providing strict building-design guidelines and promoting energy efficiency in existing buildings through proper energy retrofit interventions. Stated the great importance of this field of action, the success of these policies is absolutely pivotal. Today, high costs are a constraint which, lacking incentives or financial support, still represents a real barrier. The achievement of higher standards for households heating and cooling has the highest potential to lower the related primary energy consumptions and green house gases (GHG) emissions. This article focuses on an original energy policy that has been issued in the municipality of Reggio Emilia, Italy, called riduCO2. Several reasons make this project innovative. First, the certification method has been processed through and verified by a quality international agency (Bureau Veritas); secondly the procedure is assisting financial-incentive policies both on mandatory (European Directive on Energy Performance in Buildings - 2002/91/CE) and voluntary basis (Municipality Protocol ECOABITA); finally it allows to obtain eligible credits for avoided emissions that can be negotiated on the CO2 exchange market. In order to assess the effectiveness of such an energy policy, estimating the expected energy and environmental benefits, it was required to depict the state-of-the-art scenario characterizing the city. A deep survey of the territory has been hence pursued with the aim of identifying this reference scenario. At a second stage, the main CHP thermal-electric plants, which provide electricity and heating to the city net, had to be investigated by developing both an energetic and exergetic analysis finally outlining the energetic and emission profile of the city. Acknowledged the amount of actions, that are normally scheduled in the municipality throughout a year, it has been evaluated the benefit, in terms of environmental improvement, that should descend from riduCO2 protocol, projecting their trend in future years up to 2020 as well. The entire procedure has been developed in accordance to the parameters given by UNCCC for these kinds of analyses. Results have been continuously monitored, and finally certified by an independent international certification agency.