Comune di Genova

Genoa Municipality is the local authority acting on Genoa city’s area. Genoa Municipality’s objectives are focused on education and solidarity, quality of life, energy efficiency strategies, economy and employment, communication and promotion of the City, Port and infrastructures, city management improvement.

The Municipality of Genoa is one of the first cities in Italy to have committed itself to the Smart City initiative of the European Commission, considering the city as a complex organism needing a coordinated guidance to drive its healthy and productive growth towards a better quality of life.

The City believes the smart city holistic approach needs a strong involvement of all stakeholders as well as concrete tools to implement it. The Genova Smart City Association (AGSC) has been founded with the goal of promoting the intelligent city approach and its concrete carrying out, and includes institutions, companies, associations, research institutes and university. It also involves cultural, health, social networks, as behavioral changes and communication are considered essential to an real change in sustainability.

In the last ten years, since its first Energy Efficiency Improvement Plan in 2001, the Municipality of Genoa prepared the path to the strategic planning of a sustainable development of the city, that reached its turning point last year with the preparation of the Sustainable Energy Action Plan (SEAP) within the Covenant of Mayors initiative.

The SEAP includes a far-reaching series of actions in the following areas: the built environment, including new buildings and refurbishment, by means of the introduction of more stringent energy efficiency requirements in the new set of Building Regulations; renewable energy sources, with the installation of photovoltaic plants and thermal solar plants in schools and sports centers; and in transport, thanks to a strategy promoting local public transport through the reorganization and rationalization of the system of urban mobility.

Distributed energy generation exploiting locally available but dispersed energy sources is considered as another key element aimed at the diversification of the energy supply mix. Along with a more widespread use of district heating and CHP generation, including the use of the inverse absorption cycle for refrigeration purposes, these measures are considered among the actions aimed at reducing overall fuel consumption and CO2 emissions in combination with energy saving and efficiency improvement actions.

Each planned action is provided with a precise time schedule, identification of responsibilities and financial strategies, but also with a set of indicators useful to monitor activities in the next years.