Clean Energy Planning in Iceland - CET action bank

From workshop in Northeast Iceland

In the fall 2024 Eimur and SSNE held a series of five workshops with 10 municipalities in Northeast Iceland. The aim was to pinpoint realistic clean energy transition and climate actions with the participants, and to understand barriers for implementation.

In each workshop, participants were asked to describe their society in 5 and 15 years, emphasising clean energy and a climate friendly future, creating a future vision for the municipality. Building on this future vision, participants were to identify actions that would need to be taken in order to realise this future vision. Special emphasis was laid on spatial planning, and how good planning can accelerate the clean energy transition. Guided by the workshop facilitators participants brought their lens closer to the present, discussing which immediate actions could underpin lesser use of fossil fuel and how their municipality could support such a transition.

Having gone through this exercise with multiple participants from various municipalities in the Northeast, we were left with a multitude of different clean energy actions identified by the people working within the municipal sector (both politically elected as well as municipal staff).

In collaboration with SSNE and Vestfjarðastofa, these actions were collected into an accessible action bank for energy and efficiency related actions. Currently the bank totals 49 individual actions co-created by the workshop participants. The actions are categorised into five thematic categories “energy transition”, “municipal operations”, “transport mode shift”, “energy efficiency”, “education”. The objective of each action is described, and a suggestion is given for implementation. In the Icelandic version of the action bank, individual actions are connected to the national climate action plan where applicable.

This action bank is an essential tool in the creation of a clean energy and climate action plan currently being developed within RECET for the North-East of Iceland.

The action bank will soon be made available freely on the web!