The Greenpeace campaign will take place on Tuesday, June 13, 2017.
To promote the greater use of solar energy in tourism, Greenpeace will briefly turn the ”Greeting to the Sun” installation in Zadar into a pie chart to visually show that Croatia uses less than 1% of its solar potential. Greenpeace has invited tourist companies Valamar, Maistra, and Plava Laguna to join the campaign as they are leading the transition towards using renewable energy in Croatia, reports Zadarskilist.hr on June 10, 2017.
For the occasion, volunteers will present a small mobile photovoltaic system which can power mobile phones, play music, and provide free internet. In addition to the wealth of information about solar energy on offer, passersby will have the opportunity to participate in workshops where they can create solar lamps, and everyone will be invited to sign a petition in support of going solar.
On Wednesday, June 14th, on the premises of the Impact Center in Zadar, an educational workshop will be held for tourist companies and private owners – an ideal opportunity for hotels, hostels, campsites, and apartments to learn about the investment and transformation into solar.
“The Adriatic counts an average of 2,600 hours of sunlight per year, and we are still at the very bottom when it comes to using the sun to produce energy. We believe that the tourism sector, for several reasons, is the logical choice to take the first significant steps in the solarization of the Adriatic. Tourism facilities are located along the sunny coast, they have the highest electricity consumption in the summer, and a study has proven that the investment in photovoltaic systems especially pays off for hotels and camps,” Greenpeace stated.
Ignacio Navarro, an international energy expert, will include examples from the hotel sector in Greece in his presentation to show tourist operators that despite the financial crisis, they won the right to use their stimulating environment to produce energy for their needs, thus reducing the cost of electricity.
The importance of civic energy and how solar energy could be implemented in Croatian tourism will be presented by Boris Pavlin and John Zoković from the Green Energy Cooperative (ZEZ), a Croatian organization that works with energy cooperatives and development projects based on economic models that use renewable energy through civic participation.
