Successful Energy Efficiency Conference and debate 2009

Achieving sustainability succeeds or fails due to decisiveness. And that demands an effort from government and businesses. There is sufficient support as well as technology. That is the conclusion of the well-attended Energy Efficiency Conference, which Cofely and Electrabel held in Rotterdam on 30 September 2009.

“The world will seize, if we don’t start managing energy differently. Government, business and science need to work together to achieve a breakthrough. We owe that to future generations”, says Edo van den Assem, CEO of Cofely Nederland. During a lively energy debate, political, corporate and scientific heavyweights crossed swords. “Between the dream and the reality, there are laws, regulations and practical difficulties,” summarises Former Environmental Minister Hans Alders. “We can’t just dismiss regulations, but we are heading into the future and we’re going to need a suitable set of instruments.”

Sustainability in practice

Michael Braungart – author of the book ‘Cradle to Cradle’ – emphasised that idle talk does not gain you anything. “We’re talking about energy efficiency. However, this doesn’t actually mean efficiency, but rather effectiveness. What is the best that we can do and how do we do this as well as possible?” How we can do this was demonstrated by Hans van Happen, part of the management at Cofely Nederland. A project that visibly delivers energy benefit is the Overhoeks neighbourhood in northern Amsterdam. “It’s a residential project in which we achieve energy savings of 40 percent through heat and cold storage. This yields a CO2 reduction of 2,900 tons.”

Bart Boesmans - director of Laborelec, the research centre of Electrabel GDF SUEZ – also illustrated how this works in practice. Laborelec built the first ‘zero-emission’ research station in Antarctica. The station’s energy systems run on solar and wind energy and are completely self-sufficient. Boesmans comments: “If this is possible on Antarctica, it’s possible anywhere. We demonstrate here that you can achieve a breakthrough in sustainable energy supply by making optimum use of existing and powerful new technologies.”

Presentations available to conference participants

Conference participants can download the presentations using the link below. The password necessary to access these files will be sent shortly. If you are interested in the presentation, please contact Cofely at info@cofely-gdfsuez.nl.