City-ZEN Site Grenoble

As a major player in the Local Climate Plan since 2004 and as a Covenant of Mayors’ member since 2008, the city of Grenoble is committed to reducing energy consumption, encouraging the use of renewable energies, promoting social solidarity, setting up alternative forms of transport and developing environmental, architectural and urban quality. The main objectives of the Grenoble Local Climate Plan, launched in 2004, and revised in 2009, remain the reduction of local greenhouse gas emissions by factor 4 by 2050.

Between 2005 and 2010, energy consumption decreased by 5,4% and greenhouse gas emission were reduced by 18%. The final energy consumption per inhabitant in 2011 was 19.7 MWh. To go further and turn Grenoble into a true smart city for its inhabitants, the municipality has launched the Éco-cité project in the north side of the town. Eco-cité is gathering private and public stakeholders around demonstration projects for which political decisions have already been taken in the fields of mobility, building and energy.

Grenoble's overall objective of the City-zen project was to transform the Éco-cité area into a positive energy and carbon neutral district through retrofitting private co-owned buildings and social housing, creating a low-temperature heating and cooling network, and to develop a territorial monitoring system to monitor and manage all energy flows in order to save energy and assess the systems’ and policies’ efficiency.

Lessons Learned:

In 5 years of City-zen, the 20 projects yielded many lessons learned.

Top 3 lessons learned overall:

1. Connect

Although it is far from easy, it is also highly advisable to organize peer meetings and exchange ideas between teams from different cities as the meetings will lead to deeper levels of understanding

2. Plan time

Even when fully involved in the implementation of solutions it is important to devote time for experience sharing and dissemination

3. Empower citizens

Involve citizens/inhabitants and truly put them at the heart of the solutions' implementation

More overall learnings can be found in this document: http://www.cityzen-smartcity.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/interactive_final-deliverable-book.pdf

Learnings per project (for example, smart grid projects, retrofitting projects, etc) can be found in the project reports on this page: http://www.cityzen-smartcity.eu/home/reporting/deliverables/