From time to time, we will meet one of our partners in greater depth. Here, we're pleased to say Dag! to Eline D'hooge from POM West Flanders, in Belgium(www.pomwvl.be).
POM West Flanders (POM WF) is the regional development agency, with a mission to enhance the socio-econiomic development of the province of West Flanders. That covers everything from infrastructure to CSR, sustainability to innovation. That makes them perfect partners to lead on ANSWER's work to develop a package of measures that can support SMEs and benefit the environment.
Here, we take the chance to grab a few minutes out of the busy schedule of Eline D'hooge, Project Manager, to find out a bit more about their work.
Hello Eline. What do you see as the key strength of the ANSWER Project for West Flanders?
ANSWER has helped POM WF to intensify our energy activities for businesses. We are able to organize a series of informative events about diverse energy topics and to support businesses willing to cooperate on energy (joint energy production or exchange of excess heat). A great opportunity with high energy saving potential!
Tell us about one of your local activities in ANSWER
Apart from a series of technical measures, people’s behaviour is also determining the energy consumption. Therefore, POM WF developed a successful energy campaign for West-Flemish businesses: ‘How to engage your staff to save energy?’.
This campaign consisted of 3 actions:
- At our workshop 3 businesses testified about their approach (do’s and don’ts), inspiring the 85 attendees.
- We provided energy packs with posters, stickers and a screensaver. Within 1 week all 1000 packages were provided to about 450 interested energy managers from business, non-profit organizations or cities!
- Finally, we spread some energy tips and tricks by email to our business contacts. In order to reach as many business employees as possible, we asked them to spread the emails internally and if they did so, they could win 2 cinema tickets.
Following from this big success, another 1000 packs have been made and are now provided at local POM WF events. Within the province of West-Flanders the stickers were redistributed to schools to engage pupils and even the province of Limburg has shown interest!
http://www.answerproject.eu/news/successful_energy_campaign_beyond_west_flanders
You lead ANSWER's work with businesses as well - can you tell us something about that?
Trying to engage businesses to invest in energy saving measures is not always obvious. Some obstacles we often have to face are lack of in-house knowledge, time, or budget; or other priorities than energy. Working on similar energy topics in all ANSWER regions then can be encouraging and even inspiring! For example, trying to spread good practices through our European green business network, EN16001 courses for businesses started in East-Flanders and were multiplied in Bremen and West-Flanders, POM WF’s energy campaign may be used in UK or other regions... It is nice to see we all benefit from each other’s work.
What do you think is the area where West Flanders has most to teach our other partners?
We already had quite a lot of experience with energy cooperation between businesses. For example, on an industrial estate in Ypres the results of individual energy scans in 20 companies led to 3 cluster opportunities: a new combined heat and power plant (CHP), exchange of excess heat and direct provision of green electricity from digestion. We learned that, besides the technical and economical feasibility, communication and trust are crucial through all phases from idea through to realization.
At our transnational partner workshop in May in Ostend (BE), we exchanged some do’s and don’ts within the partnership.
What do you think is the biggest challenge in trying to engage SMEs?
Our biggest challenge is getting them interested enough to listen to how they can benefit from our energy support. Entrepreneurs have such a busy agenda and there are so many network activities to go to, that it can be difficult to attract their attention. Therefore, in West-Flanders we try to cooperate with colleagues’ projects or other local business organizations (AO, Power-Link, VOKA, Unizo…).
Lastly, POM actually stands for Provinciale Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij. That's a bit of a mouthful - can you tell us how to say the full name?
That's easy: just say it like it sounds: "Provinciale Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij West-Vlaanderen"
Um - okay, thanks. Maybe we'll stick with POM!
Thanks for your time, and keep up all the good work!
POM West Flanders are undertaking pilots with Flemish businesses as well as leading the project's overall work on business support.
For more details, email Eline.Dhooge@west-vlaanderen.be