EasyPro Second General Assembly Meeting at Lawler Sustainability
11th August 2025
On 31st July 2025, the EasyPro consortium met at Lawler Sustainability in Kilkenny for the second EasyPro General Assembly meeting. The aim of the meeting was for the EasyPro project partners to share updates on their respective work packages and plan the next steps of the project, which aims to make Irish universities carbon neutral via an Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) facilitation service. The below blogpost by Dr Sean Travers from Carr Communications outlines the event.
The meeting kicked off with a welcome and project management update from EasyPro’s coordinator, Dr Luciano De Tommasi from International Energy Research (IERC). The morning session featured presentations from each project partner organisation. Luciano also discussed EasyPro’s exploitation plan, as well as the new work package in the project that began in July 2025, entitled ‘Financial Modelling of EasyPro Projects and Investor Relations’. This work package involves carrying out investor matchmaking between funds and projects, close financing agreements for the EasyPro project bundles, and developing a process flow chart to assist universities in assessing which type of funding option is most suited to their project.
Daniel Ring from Lawler Sustainability presented the progress on the Design of the EasyPro Solution, whereby Lawler develops a list of Potential Energy Efficient Projects for each of EasyPro’s four pilot universities with estates teams. Lawler Sustainability has visited Technological University Dublin’s (TUD) Energy Strategy Site with Decarbonisation and Estates leads, and TUD has provided them with a list of their sites with project bundles and a completed EPC. Daniel and Damien Whelan also outlined the practical implementation details of the EasyPro facilitation service for the tendering process, specifically in relation to University College Cork (UCC), which has an upcoming 2.5 million Euro project at the Mardyke Arena. Joe Hayden from Codema likewise presented on their ongoing engagement with Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) and the next steps to support these currently active projects in the EasyPro timeline, whereby Codema will discuss and agree with UCC on the appropriate number of further projects to be included in the framework. Codema is also developing the Tendering Frameworks for EasyPro’s EPC projects and has proposed two frameworks, one for large EPC projects and another for smaller projects inside the university buildings.
Dr Sean Travers from Carr Communications presented updates on the Dissemination and Communication activities, as well as future plans for promoting the project to both stakeholders and general audiences. Sean discussed the project’s social media strategy, future events, and the upcoming collaboration with the consortium regarding stakeholder engagement, which includes the creation of a presentation on EasyPro’s support of the tendering process for EPC procurement. She also outlined the tailoring of EasyPro’s key messages to universities, specifically EasyPro’s role in guiding institutions through the process of selecting the right ESCO to deliver energy-saving building upgrades rather than replacing universities’ Buildings and Estates’ offices, which is a common misconception about an EPC facilitation service.
In the afternoon, the consortium held a workshop on EPC projects’ implementation at Irish universities. This was a Q&A session with stakeholders including ESCOs, Consultants, Finance Providers and Associations. The session aimed to create an additional project pipeline for EasyPro, as well as educating universities and other public bodies on best practices related to project financing and deployment. The topics of discussion included the responsibilities of the Parties in an EPC contract, the guaranteed energy savings under the terms of the EPC agreement, and some aspects related to EPC financing, which EasyPro assists universities with.
The contributions, experience and knowledge of the stakeholders in attendance was very beneficial to the progress with the EasyPro project.
