A short summary about the BioEUParks third meeting in Austria

April 16, 2015

The third project meeting of the BioEUParks project was conducted successfully in the small village of St. Nikolai in the partner region of the Sölktäler Nature Park in Austria. With a biomass heating plant, a seminar room and a well-kept restaurant St. Nikolai was the perfect setting for the participants in the project meeting on 2 and 3 April 2014.  "Biomass and renewable energy have a very high priority for us. I am therefore proud that St. Nikolai was chosen as the venue for this international meeting" says Mayor Hermann Lengdorfer during his welcoming speech to  the project partners.
At the meeting, the participants discussed the progress of the project. A focus was put on the supply chain plans, which have been adapted for each of the five nature parks. The interim goal of the parks is to activate the supply chains by the start of the next heating season in the fall of this year. This involves finding suppliers of the biomass, signing contracts, identifying potential consumers and in some of the parks building the heating plants.
During the project meeting the partners visited the biomass heating plant of St. Nikolai, which is located directly next to the meeting venue.  Since 2007 three farmers have been operating this biomass heating plant together, supplying the surrounding population with thermal energy from renewable biomass from the region. One of the farmers, Franz Reiter, gave a tour of the heating plant , and showed the project participants the warehouse space for the wood and the wood chips at his nearby farm.
The BIOEUPARKS project runs under the Intelligent Energy Europe (IEE) program until March 2016. The project is coordinated by Diego Mattioli of Legambiente in Italy. The next project meeting will be held in the Rodopi National Park in northeastern Greece in autumn 2014.