Description

The main objective of the project is to extend the best available practices for the evaluation of the energy situation and for the adoption of improving measures amongst the European SMEs on the agro-food sector. Within this sector, TESLA project will focus on the agro-industry cooperatives of wineries, olive oil mills, animal feed factories, and fruits and vegetables processing plants. In these agro-industrial processes the main input, besides the raw material, is energy consumption.

Project implementation will involve the execution of 110 energy audits in the same number of cooperatives, belonging to these sectors. The audit methodology will be standardized, following the most updated standard for Energy Auditing -  EN 16247:2012. These audits will be executed by a multidisciplinary team, including experts in energy efficiency and in agro-food engineering, set up for the project and trained during it. Overall the audits will identify around 1000 energy specific efficiency measures, and it is foreseen that around 300 measures will be implemented with the support of the partners whithin the project lifetime.

Four handbooks on energy efficiency for SMEs of each sector will be released on first stage of project, and detailed technical guides on Best Available Techniques (BAT), for Energy Efficiency aimed at professionals involved in the design and management of agro-food facilities will be published at a later stage. These guides will compile all the lessons learned from the auditing and implementation of energy efficiency measures.

Members of the consortium will use the tools and knowledge acquired in the project to carry out a dissemination and consciousness-raising campaign amongst the 7,372 associated cooperatives. The challenge is maintaining or increasing its competitiveness through extending the adequate and accurate use of energy in its facilities. TESLA has scheduled a large plan of SMEs brokerage events, involving important enterprises in agro-food supplies, and will also make a wide use of computer technologies, like web 2.0 and the existing chil.com agro-food knowledge-base platform.