Workpackage 4 and 6 contain the most important activities of the COACH BioEnergy project regarding the contents and future services. Members of the respective working groups met in mid March to discuss progress, actual problems and further steps. Venue of the meeting was Güssing, Austria, at the project partner European Center of Renewable Energy, which is famous for its „Güssing Model“ is the strategy of de-centralised, local energy production with all available renewable resources in a region.

The task of workpackage 4 (WP4) is the ‘Content provision for energetic use of biomass’ in course of the COACH BioEnergy project. Its thus the responsibility of the WP lead Szent István University from Budapest, Hungary to provide the scientific information and data on sustainable biomass utilization for the virtual net – the web based database of the project. While the list of technologies which COACH BioEnergy will deal with has already been defined before the meeting, the structure of the documents describing these technologies (so called technology descriptions) was discussed in detail in Güssing. These documents shall have a well-arranged and common structure, include the most recent scientific information and address also sustainability aspects.

Workpackage 6 (WP6) is called ’COACH BioEnergy services for Regional Development’ and is responsible for the implementation of the regional consultancy service to assure a wide usage of the COACH BioEnergy virtual net and related services. Work in progress focuses here on the development of a common framework for ’renewable energy strategy planning’ and ‘policy analyses’. Renewable energy strategy planning aims at finding the most appropriate technology mix for renewable energy production under the given circumstances of a specific site or region. Planning shall consider all the three aspects of sustainability: environmental, social and economic and use the following techniques: surveys, interviews, scenario workshops; modelling of processes and land use; economic feasibility calculations; energy efficiency calculations and multi-criteria evaluations. Policy analyses carried out in each participating country shall visualise the institutions related to biomass utilization in the respective countries, assess the effectivity of biomass policies and serve with adequate policy advice. The structure of policy analyses has been discussed at the Güssing meeting.