Carbon and energy management on eco-industrial parks: case study Flanders’ carbon neutral industry parks

Industrial parks and business sites offer a welcome opportunity to promote and implement local investments for higher carbon efficiency. Such parks are geographic concentrations of energy consuming, and increasingly even energy producing enterprises. Moreover, an active management team running the park, keeping close contact with the enterprises and delivering collective services, is gaining ground in industrial environs. The importance of a sustainable management of business clusters is fully recognised in Flanders. It is the cornerstone of the ‘carbon neutrality’ objective –zero CO2 emission in electricity consumption– launched in 2007 and is integrated in the act concerning public co-financing of the (re)development of industrial and business parks in Flanders. Despite the incentive, however, the approach still mainly focuses on individual companies instead of business clusters. Collective energy production opportunities and clustering in energy exchange, though, are slowly but surely regarded as an alternative, promising approach of ‘carbon neutrality’ management, paving the way to smart energy applications such as microgrids and encouraging local renewable energy production.