Almada - Ayent - Bielsko-Biala - Bristol - Lausanne - Leicester - Milton-Keynes - Saarbrücken

When awareness raising and saving money go hand in hand

The city of Saarbrücken (Germany) with 182 000 inhabitants and 260 municipal buildings has participated in the Display Campaign since 2004 under the guidance of Energie-Cités. First of all the data from all 32 of the town’s primary schools was entered into the calculation tool. The effort required was fortunately very small due to an existing energy management system.

Posters with the results of this analysis had been put up in the entrance hall of all the schools involved by the end of 2004. In the first school concerned, situated in the community of St Arnual, the mayor Kajo Breuer put up the very first poster. This was followed by a discussion on the topic of energy use between the pupils, teachers and the mayor. He was very impressed by the pupils’ high level of knowledge and by the posters on the subject of energy and water consumption that they had produced themselves.

The local press and television broadcasts reported on the action and it stimulated several requests from other schools about how to implement and to continue with energy saving.
Thanks to this success the data of all kindergartens and administrative buildings have been entered in the Display system and 75 buildings are now registered in the system. The classification of the buildings A to G provides particularly useful information to municipalities for the strategic planning of the refurbishment of local authority buildings and helps to spend their money efficiently.

The programme gained attention in the surrounding region as well. Saarbrücken together with Metz, Trier and Luxemburg is part of the city network "QuattroPole". This network organises so-called "Energy tours" in the different cities in order to exchange experience concerned with energy questions. On the 18th May 2005 the programme for the energy tour of Saarbrücken was presented. The Display Campaign played a key role among all the topics covered by the tour. The exchange took place in the St Arnual Primary School, which is very committed to the project.