A conference was held in November in Montreuil, near Paris, to mark the end of a three year domestic energy project, Eco n'Home. The project has developed a best practice model for providing a personalized energy advice service to households, which was then piloted in almost 1,000 households across Europe.

Eco n'Home, which was supported by the ‘Intelligent Energy Europe' programme of the European Commission brought together expertise from ten organizations from six European countries. It has proved highly successful in terms of helping individuals and families reduce their energy usage in their homes and transport, in turn reducing their CO2 emissions. Marches Energy Agency has been the lead UK partner on the project and has delivered the advice service in over 50 households across Shropshire, achieving an average reduction of 1.2 tonnes of CO2 emissions in these households.

Eco n'Home's final conference was a great success with almost 200 delegates from across Europe attending and a number of key note speakers including Mark Hinnells from the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University and Françoise Bartiaux, from the Catholic University of Leuven. The Eco n'Home team presented the project's findings to conference delegates including how the advice service was carried out, the results obtained and the lessons learnt. As the project was developed to be replicated by other energy agencies, a number of recommendations were put forward for potentially interested organizations and this led to discussions on how such a service could be implemented on a wider and longer-term scale.

For more information on the Eco n'Home project and the conference, please visit the project website at http://www.econhome.eu.