At the instigation of the city of Giessen's building construction department, an energy management system was established on site, which Stadtwerke Giessen (SWG) has been implementing for the university city for two years. The aim is to continuously reduce energy and water consumption and the associated costs in the city's properties. The success achieved so far is impressive: The first energy report shows savings of around 584,000 euros for 2016.
"There is still much greater potential for savings in the city," says Michael Rösner, Head of Sales Private & Commercial Customers at SWG and as such responsible for organising a special training course: on 18 September, 17 heads of department from the city of Giessen accepted his invitation to an event at the Queckborn waterworks. Here they learnt from proven experts how they can actively contribute to a further reduction in municipal energy requirements.
Theory and practice
The intensive training was divided into an informative lecture on "Saving energy in municipal facilities" and a one-and-a-half-hour workshop entitled "Discovering savings potential and motivating employees". This served to teach the managers how they can get the many municipal employees permanently interested in the topic of energy efficiency. "The heads of department are important multipliers. If they manage to get the vast majority of municipal employees on board and motivate them to adopt energy-saving behaviour, it should be possible to tap into the remaining savings potential to a large extent," explains Martin Zielke, who is responsible for energy management at SWG.
Such annual training courses are an integral part of energy management, which SWG organises for the city. Consequently, Stadtwerke Gießen has been organising similar training courses since 2017. These are aimed not only - as is currently the case - at the heads of the various offices, but also at the numerous caretakers who work for the city administration and the staff in the kindergartens and daycare centres.
In a special training course at the Queckborn waterworks, SWG taught the heads of Giessen's municipal offices how they can motivate their staff to save energy. The aim is to sustainably reduce the city of Giessen's energy consumption.