With the first edition in 2015 and the latest one in 2019, the Municipality of Cornellà de Llobregat organised a popular run to create awarenness about energy poverty. In addition, the municipality developed a support scheme for people in a situation of energy poverty using money raised during the traditional public run.
In 2015, with the aggravation of energy poverty in Cornellà de Llobregat, the city council decided to reframe the traditional popular public run, which takes place within the framework of the cities’ local festivities and the EU energy week and use it to create awareness of energy poverty among its participants. In order to do so, the city council contracted a non-profit consultancy expert on energy poverty, Ecoserveis, to develop informational material that was set in key parts of the run so that the participants could see how many calories they burned and what this meant in kWh.
In addition, taking into account the growing demand for subsidies needed to tackle energy poverty situations in Cornellà, the munici-pality decided to give a monetary value to:
The average calories burned by each one of the participants in the popular run (in kWh);
The total amount of calories burned by the participants in the energy-poverty-related activities that took place during the EU energy week in Cornellà.The amount resulting from this symbolic transformation was then allocated as part of a municipal budget to carry out energy audits in vulnerable households.
The project, with a budget between 10.000 and 100.000€, developed the following activities:
- Creation and implementation of a tool to relate calories consumed to kWh and these into euros.
- Creation of informational material.
- Carry out the run and count the number of participants and their time to see the calories consumed and translate it into euros that the municipality will use to carry out energy audits.
- Carry out energy audits.
After 5 editions, the city council recognised that the activity has been very popular among both the organisers and participants. In addition, it was necessary to put an emphasis on the link between communicating about energy poverty and being able to reach very specific groups that have traditionally been made invisible, and are especially affected by energy poverty, such as the elderly. Furthermore, thanks to the allocated money, resources were used to help tackle energy poverty among these groups.
Some concrete key performance indicators (KPIs) of the project include:
- Number of people attended the event (4 years): 2500.
- Beneficiary families : 190.
- Euros invested: €60.000.
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Countries impacted:
Spain -
Geographical scale:
Regional and Local -
Energy poverty phase:
Implementation -
Intervention type:
Consumer Advice, protection and empowermentFinancial mechanismsHousehold energy efficiency and refurbishment -
Professionals involved:
EngineerMember of a local/national authorityTechnician -
Type of funding:
Local funds from Ajuntament de Cornellà -
SDGs addressed:
