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GGGI supports International Knowledge-Sharing Event on Building Energy Efficiency

On October 5-9, in an effort to strengthen leadership for Energy Efficiency and ESCO development in building energy efficiency in Mongolia, GGGI an facilitated international knowledge sharing event in Bratislava, Slovakia.

The overall objective of this knowledge sharing event was to develop vision and build the capacity of decision and policy makers in energy efficiency in building sectors, including high level officials from Mayor’s Office, Ulaanbaatar City Municipality, Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), Ministry of Construction and Urban Development (MCUD), and Ministry of Finance (MOF).
The event participants were positioned to advance implementation of EE targets, particularly in residential and public building, for their respective areas and sectors, such as energy conservation, construction, financing and implementation.
The participants  benefited through:
– Knowledge-sharing of country approaches to modernization of apartment blocks and financing of modernizations of apartment blocks
– Learning from legal framework for apartment blocks maintenance and;
– Best practices on Modernizations of public buildings through ESCO services.

Background
Sustainable energy is a key engine for economic, social and sustainable development of Mongolia. Energy sector alone accounts for 60% of Mongolia’s GHG emissions – 95% of the energy is generated from fossil fuel resources. Energy efficiency for green growth has been increasingly on the global agenda.

In September 2016, Mongolia ratified its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in accordance with the Green Development Policy (2014) and its Action Plan (2016). Mongolia’s overall commitment is to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 14% by 2030 compared to Business-As-Usual (BAU). One of the main drivers to achieve this goal is to improve energy efficiency (EE) in production, distribution, transmission, and usage.

The Government of Mongolia has set ambitious targets and goals to improve EE, conservation of energy and reduce energy losses. For instance, in Mongolia’s Green Development Policy and INDC document, it set out goal to reduce building heat loss by 20% by 2020 and 40% by 2030. Furthermore, Law on Energy Conservation (2015) has been adopted in order to implement these goals, and identified 99 high energy consumers, also known as designated entities, which are obliged to carry out EE measures every three years. Although, there has been a number of legal and regulatory improvements to avail from EE potential in Mongolia, there is a gap in terms of residential building EE potential (not included in the designated entities), in aggregate terms it consumes 40 per cent energy that is more than industry and transport sectors combined. It shows that residential building sector has greater potential to reduce energy demand, ultimately to reduce the CO2 emission.

Ulaanbaatar (UB) City has the highest number of building stock in Mongolia. According to Mayor’s Office, there are 1077 pre-fabricated buildings in UB city which has high building heat loss. Mayor’s office has developed sub-program to carry out thermal-technical retrofits for these buildings, starting with 88 buildings that has passed the earthquake resilience test.
GGGI is supporting the Mayor’s office to achieve its residential EE targets, as well as to contribute towards the national goals by carrying out investment-grade energy audits for model residential buildings to assess EE potential and its investment needs. As a second phase, in cooperation with the Mayor’s Office and ICLEI East Asia Secretariat, GGGI has developed an initial design for a business model that uses a Standard Offer Approach, that will introduce market-based energy performance contracting and innovative financing mechanisms for thermo-technical retrofitting (TTR) for residential buildings.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is implementing a technical assistance project for MCUD to develop and establish and Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system for construction and building sector. As buildings consumes major energy in Mongolia (11% of the the total GHG emission), improving energy efficiency in existing buildings will avoid potential GHG emissions. For both GGGI and UNDP’s ongoing effort, this knowledge exchange event will play instrumental role to instill vision and implementation roadmap for major decision makers in the sector.