The SCOoPE Project objective is to reduce energy consumption, by implementing cost-effective energy solutions, at a short term in a range between 10% and 15% directly in 81 businesses in the sectors of crop drying, meat and poultry, dairy, and fruit and vegetables transformation.

This reduction should be achieved without any decrease in the production capacity of the companies and maintaining good socioeconomic and environmental conditions. For reaching these objectives, the project will work with the uptake of specific and cross-cutting innovative technologies and techniques, whose efficacy has been proven in other industrial sectors different from the agro-food sector, but not being familiar o rarely implemented in the agro-food sector.

On the other hand, the SCOoPE project pursues larger savings in the medium term with new affordable intelligent energy solutions, specifically by proving in operational environment the “Collaborative Energy Management Systems”.

It will take advantage of complementarities and synergies among analysed industrial sites with similar characteristics or proximity and will use them for the improvement of their joint energy efficiency. For this purpose, 6 pilot industrial clusters in 5 different countries will be set up and used for assessing the improvements in overall energy consumptions and its associated costs that could be achieved by using common procedures based on the ISO 50.001 standard and supported by specific software developed by the project.

Moreover, for the achievement of these objectives, the project is addressed to the direct involvement of equipment suppliers and financial institutions enabling the necessary investments to enhance energy efficiency in agro-food industries. These contacts between agro-food industries and Key Actors (technology providers and financial institutions) will also boost further collaborations between them, beyond project lifetime.

Finally, the project will deliver a reservoir of specially qualified human resources, fact-based knowledge and techniques, and customized software tools, that will be useful for and applicable to other thousands of European companies in the same agro-food subsectors or dealing with the same industrial processes. In this sense, strong dissemination and exchange of experiences from directly involved businesses to similar European companies will spur on the change in managers’ behaviour needed for a systematic focus on the continuous improvement of energy efficiency.