Half a billion Norwegian kroner goes to energy-efficient school buildings for Polish children

Eighth graders Natalia Kwiaton, Karol Adarczyk, and Magdalena Mucha, along with the four hundred other students from Zspturza School in the municipality of Gorzyce, welcomed researcher Kirsti Midttømme from NORCE . It is a day for celebration. The school is completely finished inside and soon to be finished renovated outside, and they have moved into new classrooms after ten months in borrowed premises.

– Children are our future. We must invest in them with good learning environments, said Principal Klaudie Tatarzyk, delighted to welcome guests to the celebration.

Zspturza School in the municipality of Gorzyce in Poland is one of over 20 schools that have been energy-efficiently renovated with the help of the EEA Grant and Norway Grant. NORCE and the municipal council led by Mayor Daniel Jakubczyk visit all the students, and the day is celebrated with songs and speeches.

More than 20 Polish schools have received funds from the EEA Grants. Around 500 million Norwegian kroner have been used over several years to improve the energy efficiency of Polish schools. NORCE, as a Norwegian institution, has a partner role in the energy efficiency improvements that have taken place in several of the schools supported through this program. Norway's EEA membership, and following that, the programs we are involved in mean supporting 15 European EU countries through various EEA Grant and Norway Grant programs.

And Gorzyce municipality has also used its own funds and taken the opportunity to upgrade the buildings both with standard technical and structural materials. But not just energy-efficient buildings with new windows and new energy solutions: Here are dedicated language rooms, maths rooms, history rooms, and geography rooms.

Mayor Jakobczyk has big plans for the municipality and is very pleased with the money from the EEA Grant.

– Our ancestors from Gorzyce fought for Norway during World War II, and it is nice that Norway now, through the EEA Grant funds, is helping us to get better school buildings, greeted Mayor Daniel Jakubczyk the guests from Norway.

After we returned home, it is also clear that the mayor, during the weekend's election round, gained new trust from the municipality's residents, and he was re-elected as mayor. Nine years were not enough for the municipality's 20,000 residents. They want to give him a new term.

– We have been involved in projects in six of the over twenty schools that have been upgraded with EEA funds over the past few years, says NORCE researcher Kirsti Midttømme.

In total, the Norwegian EEA funds, which come from EEA Grant funds and the Norway Grant project, have amounted to half a billion Norwegian kroner. Midttømme has visited several of them.

During the visit to Gorzyce, Midttømme could talk about Polish and Norwegian peculiarities regarding energy use and needs.

Norway's 5.3 million inhabitants use almost as much energy per capita as Poland's 38.4 million people. While Poland relies heavily on coal as a base for electricity, we in Norway have significant use of energy from electricity from hydropower for our homes and industries.

But in terms of CO2 emissions per capita, we are not far from the Poles due to our large gas and oil production for the world.

Energy efficiency and climate change are at the forefront of everyone's minds in Gorzyce. Everyone remembers 1997. It is their black year. The flood from the storm almost engulfed the entire municipality, and many villages were wiped out. As a result, miles of flood embankments have now been built in the region. (see image)

In Gorzyce, the municipality has also adopted both modern heat pumps and made significant investments in what we call solar panels. And even private individuals in Poland are adept at installing solar panels on their private homes. There are also significant opportunities to use heat from the ground, i.e., geothermal energy, and the Poles are now exploring more use of geothermal energy.

- There are good opportunities for the Poles to further improve their energy efficiency by using geothermal energy, says Midttømme.