Introduction

In the last few years the energy costs have risen rapidly. Besides that, the realization about the urgency of reducing CO2-emissions has been growing simultaneously. Both facts are an important reason to deliberately handle with the use of energy, both in homes and outside. For homeowners the possibility for offering advise for saving energy has been available for a longer period, but for social housing the market is wide open and there is a lot to win in saving energy and saving money from that for social households.

Objectives and target audience

The overall objective of the project is to reduce energy use in 10.000 households who live in social housing. The project aims at a threefold impact on society:

• Reduction of CO2;
• Helping social housing households saving money on their energy-bill;
• Giving young unemployed people a chance on the job-market with education and good guidance.

The beneficiaries are the young unemployed who receive an education and have a job for at least a year and also the social households who save money by saving energy

Financial Resources and Partners involved

The main parties involved are: City of Amsterdam, Energy company NUON, Housing corporation Far-West and Ymere. The whole project is sponsored by Philips.

Process

The Step2Save pilot programme is developed in Amsterdam. Young unemployed citizens selected by the Work & Income Department- spend a year visiting 10,000 social housing households to give free energy advice and install energy-saving devices.
Before that, the young unemployed are trained through a programme called Step2Work. This is open for jobless people from 18 to 30. Those who enter the programme receive training and working experience during 1 year.
This training is done by the energy company NUON. After the training, they are energy-advisers and their work consists on visiting social housing households in one year.

Results

During the pilot phase, there were ten energy advisors who were ringing the doorbell and handed out the energy box and gave advice.
In 2007, 106 participants signed up for the NUON Step2Work programme. So far Step2save has given nearly 6000 advices and energyboxes which means that all these people can now start saving energy and money.
In terms of energy use, it has been proved that with the advise and the box, each household is able to reduce 200kg of CO2, which means around €70,- a year on their energy bill (on average 5%).
Due to the big success, the municipality is now working on a new cooperation (maybe with more partners) in order to continue Step2save after September 2008.

Critical Success Factors / Challenges

The approach followed, to ring the doorbell and visit each house, has proved to be very successful. Previous attempts where citizens had to register before receiving the visit did not work as well as Step2save.
Another success factor has been the cooperation between the different parties. Not only human resources but financial as well. The investment of the sponsor has also benefited a lot.