The Energy Advising Points (PAE) are one of the most requested and fastest-growing services of the Barcelona City Council in recent years. The main objectives of the PAE are to ensure that residents can exercise their energy rights and improve the energy efficiency of their homes, promote employment among those who are unemployed and facing greater difficulties, and act within communities to enable residents to help each other. In short, they aim to provide knowledge on how to save energy and empower citizens.
The combination of these actions has resulted in thousands of people being served in the past six years, making this service one of the most utilized in the city. For this reason, among others, the Barcelona City Council has become a finalist for the Eurocities Awards 2023, the winner of which will be announced at the Urban Summit in Brussels in June.
The Eurocities Awards are prestigious honors given by this network of interconnected major European cities, which annually recognize initiatives driven by municipal entities that contribute to improving the quality of life for their citizens.
A service to empower citizens
With 12 offices spread across the city’s ten districts, the PAE (Energy Advising Points) assist all families who wish to receive general advice on how to reduce their energy bills or schedule an appointment to better understand their bill and explore ways to reduce it.
In many cases, however, the situation is more serious: around 90% of the families who visit their local PAE office struggle to pay their energy bills, to the point that some are close to experiencing a power cut or have already gone through it. This is when the 27 energy advisors who make up the service come into play.
The positive effects of the initiative have led to efforts to expand the service with more PAE offices and to promote responsible energy consumption from early childhood, through a collaboration with the municipal program ‘Sustainable Schools’.