In an era when environmental issues are exponentially raising concerns around the world and call for sustainable solutions, the XPRESS Project aims to facilitate the introduction of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) in specific cities and municipalities within the UK, Italy, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Slovakia, Portugal and Belgium with the perspective to enlarge RES solutions to other countries.
These environmentally friendly services will be implemented through Green Public Procurement (GPP) in collaboration with SMEs. In order to achieve significant a impact, the project is supported by the Horizon 2020 programme, the most considerable research and innovation initiative by the European Union.
XPRESS – Facilitating green public procurement in the energy sector, has a total budget of 3 Million Euros, working alongside 16 partners among which the International Network for SMEs – INSME.
The Network will contribute to the organization of events; the drafting of good practices case studies and identification of public procurement projects; the analysis of the data collected covering both the barriers to investments in innovation in RES and innovative SMEs.
XPRESS focuses on GPP procedures to join forces with the public sector. The transition towards sustainable solutions assumes high risk innovations along with additional funds, unlikely raised by the private sector on its own. Banks and other financial entities tend to hesitate to supply funds for RES as the probability of survival of innovative SMEs is uncertain.
The XPRESS project aims to help stimulate constructive dialogue between the public and private sectors, evaluating the impact of GPPs and other strategies on the probability of SMEs to survive the so-called “valley of death”.
The final and most important goal is to raise the share of renewable energy solutions in the final energy consumption.
To meet these challenges, XPRESS will create a web platform as a mean to raise interaction between public procurers, innovative SMEs and end users of green innovations; map the cities and municipalities’ low carbon energy needs with RES technology developed by innovative SMEs; improve the application of GPPs to innovative RES technologies; and lastly increase the awareness of innovative SMEs about RES technologies. By doing so, XPRESS will demonstrate the positive impact of innovative GPPs on cities, municipalities and SMEs in terms of energy saving, energy efficiency and low carbon emission.
Source: XPRESS Consortium
