P.E.E.S. was an educational project which aimed at energy awareness of students attending the secondary schools with a strong attention on the involvement of the teachers. In order to obtain significant changes in the behaviours of energy-system users and to enable a sustainable use of the energy, facing matters about energy and environment, only the dissemination of the knowledge is not sufficient, it was necessary to actuate changes in the behaviours defining and using proactive methods of involvement. The main targets were teenaged students (15-18 years old) and their teachers. Furthermore, the project was oriented to realize a common auditing pattern of energy consumption within schools buildings (tools and know-how have been supplied by the Energy Agencies) involving representative workgroups of students and teachers which co-operated with the technicians of the five European Energy Agencies which constituted the Consortium that realized the project: i.e. Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, UK – England.

During the “preparatory phase” has been selected one pilot-school for each Country involved. In the first phase of the project process the agencies’ personnel took care to arrange an educational schedule about energy and environmental issues addressed to the students and teachers of these schools. After, the first step of the educational programme, named “General Educational Schedule”, was activated. Third phase: realization of the “Technical Educational Schedule”; it was focused on the definition and implementation of a common methodology to monitor the status quo in terms of energy consumption. “Energy Teams” made up of technicians of the agencies, groups of teachers and students from the pilot-schools were constituted. A significant part of the project was that the “Energy Teams”, supported by the agencies’ technicians, made the energetic audit pointing out the critical urgencies and planning the potential interventions.
Follow-up: the quoted subjects were related to set up long lasting “Energy School Managements”, supported by the technicians of the local agencies.
The final impact of the project was to obtain significant changes in the environmental awareness and rational use of energy in the students and teachers of the secondary schools. To obtain, in short term, the reduction of energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the involved schools and in longer term in the other schools of the involved Countries. The project caused other concrete results as a subordinate but not insignificant effects, the dissemination of the acquired notions about the energy saving within own families, conveyed through daily practice and not only through theoretical discourse, functioning as “energy ambassadors”.
This project was a natural implementation of the activities about energy education, involving students and teachers. Furthermore, the PEES Project started up a Network of Local Energy Agencies able to transfer the acquired know-how to other Energy Agencies in other Countries, mostly by FEDARENE but also using the existent national networks such as Italian RENAEL, Greek DEEK, Portuguese RENAE, Spanish ENERAGEN, British AUKEA, and European networks such as ESHA (European School Heads Association), AEDE (the European Association of Teachers).