e-book - European Schoolnet

Empowered and enterprising pupilscreate their own Local Energy Authority in France“We must raise greater awareness of thesethemes but we must do this, not by makingpeople feel guilty, but through empowerment.The pupils in the project understood this. Whenthe property developer presented the ecoapartmentproject to us, the kids who lived onthe housing estate questioned the approach,pointing at the low level of insulation in theoriginal buildings and the responsibility ofconstructors to make homes energy-efficient.”“L’énergie, c’est la classe”, the nameof this U4energy project, is a play onwords meaning both energy comesfrom the entire class and energyis cool, and this project is just that.Technology teacher Fabien Tora’spupils became company employees,creating Aléa, a local energy authority,offering energy assessment, technologicalimprovement, behaviouralchange and consumption managementto real clients.Fabien’s students (all boys) conducted their project during their ‘technology and renewableenergy’ baccalaureate under a new sub-section called ‘energy and environment’. A new, morefl exible, teaching structure enabled them to embark on Aléa and apply their ideas as a teamwithin and outside the school in a way most of them had never done before.Aléa has all the elements of atypical company. An accounts teamproduced sophisticated fi nancialmodels illustrating daily, weekly andmonthly energy consumption whilethe technology team worked on theassessment and installation of energysavingsolutions. Prototypes of ecohouseswere created as well asexperiments using heat detectors andenergy meters to illustrate the energysavingimpact of devices such as thermotrack buttons. There was a qualityFabien Tora, teacher.“The opportunity to create an energyagency and take responsibility for reallife,concrete projects was clearly amassive inspiration to the students, withimpressive results. I wouldn’t be at allsurprised if this project had just createda whole class of future energy auditors,managers and efficiency engineers!”Erica Hope, Senior Policy Officer (Energy Saving), Coalitionfor Energy Savings - Climate Action Network Europe(CAN-E) and Member of the European Grand Jurycontrol department, a communications team who generated media coverage and raised fundsfor charity through a low heating ‘big pullover day’ and an HR department that held energyawareness meetings called ‘philosophy cafés’ for other classes. Aléa had a logo, a slogan anda mission and worked in tandem with external partners. French energy company EdF gavethe boys advice on energy auditing while local property developer, Alliade Habitat, involved25