The 3-NITY summary

The 3-NITY Vision
Any local community can become a Sustainable Energy Community.  By mobilising all stakeholders, they will contribute actively in a guided process and specially adapted support tools for decision-making can be made available. Local politicians, municipal planners, market actors and citizens will play their specific roles in this process. However, there are challenges:

Sustainable Energy Planning:Consistency in periodical reporting is a general problem, and if the data collection, processing and presentation of result are not consistent, the outcome of the reporting is most uncertain. The REAM model responds to this challenge (REAM will be available soon)

Sustainable Measures and Activities:Energy efficiency action plans can be made up in as many ways as there are cities in Europe. There are, however, some critical success-factors to consider in such a planning process, e.g. integrate energy and climate planning in the local planning hierarchy, base the planning on facts, realistic planning of activities to enhance implementation. The 3-NITY Activity plan responds to this challenge

Sustainable Excellence:is a relatively new concept, and is believed to become increasingly important with the requirements for higher performance in municipal organizations that have committed themselves to deliver according to very ambitious targets. The 3-NITY version of the Excellence/CAF model responds to this challenge

Documents to download from the project :

3-NITY Summary documents
3-NITY Summary
3-NITY Summary Slides
3-NITY Factsheet
3-NITY Publishable Report. "Municipal Energy and Climate Planning"
3-NITY Final Technical Implementation Report (August 2008)
3-NITY Newsletters

3-NITY Newsletter No 1

3-NITY Newsletter No 2

3-NITY Newsletter No 3

3-NITY Newsletter No 4

3-NITY Newsletter No 5

3-NITY Newsletter No 6

3-NITY Newsletter No 7

3-NITY Newsletter No 8
3-NITY Work Package Reports
WP1 Report - Management of the project
WP2 Report - State of the art, review
WP3 Report - Sustainable Energy Planning
WP4 Report - Sustainable Measures and Activities

WP4 Sub-Report - SEC Status at European Level

WP5 Report - Sustainable Excellence
WP6 Report - Project Specific Communication
3-NITY Tools and programs
The REAM Model
The Energia game
3-NITY Self Assessment tool
3-NITY Activity plan



The 3-NITY vision
Any local community can become a Sustainable Energy Community by mobilising all stakeholders to contribute actively in a guided process where specially adapted support tools for decision-making are made available. Local politicians, municipal planners, market actors and citizens will play their specific roles in this process.

The 3-NITY objectives
The quantitative objective for 3-NITY is to improve the level of consistency and security throughout the planning and decision-making processes at local level. Consistency with respect to meeting international and national regulations and standards regarding energy policy objectives, planning and target setting requirements as well as reporting procedures is important in this respect. Security for investments and future allocations of public resources is of critical importance for politicians and planners at local level.

The qualitative objective for 3-NITY is to involve all the relevant stakeholders in local energy planning processes, and thereby improve their joint ability to make better decisions with respect to local sustainability, and related effects e.g job creation, social cohesion etc. A key issue of the EFQM excellence model is that such qualitative improvements should be possible to measure, and this will be a key issues also for the 3-NITY project. If successfully implemented, the Sustainable Excellence will secure a long-term engagement and continuity of the 3-NITY activities within the SECs.


The 3-NITY results and outcomes

The 3-NITY project has produced some very interesting results, some expected, and some not. The guidebook ““Energy- and climate planning in the municipalities” has been developed in Norway on the basis of certain national and international methodologies related to local energy and climate planning, and the 3-NITY project has been an important contributor. This guidebook includes elements from most of the 3-NITY outcomes, and has in fact become the perfect synthesis of the 3-NITY project. Other results from the project are:

The 3-NITY lessons learned

Lesson #1: Parallel development of advanced tools and methodologies with full scale testing in municipal real-life is complex, and should maybe not be mixed.

Lesson #2: The 3-NITY tools are best suited for municipalities with engaged top level politicians and managers that already have started to work seriously on energy- and climate issues, and that have decided to become better at it.

Lesson #3: Local authorities needs a stronger legal mandate, better financial support as well as increased know-how in order to engage properly in energy- and climate issues


The 3-NITY Work Packages

WP1 - Management
The purpose of project management is to control, secure and constantly seek to improve the progress of the project. Consortium agreement and handling of contracted work-program is within the scope. Monitoring of progress and performance, the management of the consortium with management tools and regular meetings is a part of WP 1. The overall communication and contact with the EC are key issues.

WP2 – Review, state of the art
The objective is to understand the main mechanisms affecting the development of SECs. This will be achieved by interviewing target groups that are related to the previously established SEC, as well as the SECs participating in the project.

WP3 – Sustainable Planning
This WP of the 3-NITY initiative aims to further develop an existing tool for local energy planning, prepared for active involvement by several levels in the local community i.e. politicians, planners, energy experts and consultants. The basis for the tool will be the existing KRAM model, which was successfully developed by Chalmers (Sweden) in the 1990’s. The output from the planning tool will be popularized and used for involvement of citizens (WP6)

WP4 – Sustainable Measures and Activities
This WP of the 3-NITY project aims to engage citizens and local energy actors to actively participate in local energy planning and implementation of sustainable energy measures. This will be achieved by providing a series of local events, state-of-the-art tools and methodologies at the disposal of the municipal administration, the commercial energy actors, the local schools and the citizens.

WP5 – Sustainable Excellence
The objective for this part of the 3-NITY project is to make use of the already existing framework of Public Sector Performance Groups sponsored by EFQM, and to establish a new group called “Sustainable Energy Communities”. Furthermore the WP will develop a tool for monitoring and measuring qualitative and quantitative results, mainly based on the EFQM-excellence model for local governments and municipalities.

WP6 – Project specific information and dissemination
This WP will disseminate the results in two main directions:

1. internally- within the participating SECs and their stakeholders
2. externally - to potentially new SECs and stakeholders to support replication to multiple SECs across Europe.


WP7 – Common dissemination activities
The WP will ensure widespread and target oriented dissemination of the developed guidelines and other deliverables with a view to promoting SEC’s around Europe. The key means of dissemination will be a project website and a quarterly E-Newsletter targeting local authorities and other relevant actors at a broad EU level. Further to this the specific outcome of the project cases will be disseminated at seminars and related means on a European, National and regional scale.