The Young Energy Ambassadors group represents young people's views on important societal issues at the European level and consists of 30 people from different countries of the European Union. Ing. Jiří Bím from the Department of Economics, Management and Humanities at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering CTU became a member last spring. His predecessor was Šárka Jablonská, a PhD student also studying at the same department.
At the Youth Policy Dialogue meeting, the young ambassadors made a total of 12 energy-related recommendations to Dan Jørgensen, the European Commissioner for Energy and Housing.
One of their recommendations is to support the adoption of renewable energy sources (RES) in smaller communities in cities. According to the Youth Ambassadors, a certain percentage of loans for RES projects should be directed towards these communities and citizens. They also propose financial support for European production of renewable energy technologies, integrating EU countries’ electricity markets and establishing a centre for financing energy infrastructure where planners would have access to all the energy infrastructure financing instruments offered by the European institutions. They also see benefits in, for example, the establishment of a European Energy Academy platform to educate energy experts and the inclusion of topics on the Green Deal and the transition from fossil fuels to RES in school curricula.
"Since I have been focusing on the preparation of legislative changes in the Czech Republic for some time now, I am very happy that I was able to present similar ideas that I am trying to promote in the Czech Republic to the European Commissioner. In addition to our recommendations, we also discussed issues related to the current geopolitical crisis, and the Commissioner clearly emphasised that it is the development of renewable electricity sources that will help Europe strengthen its energy independence, which is now proving crucial," says Bím.
Ing. Jiří Bím also works as the head of the section of permitting processes and agrovoltaics in the Solar Association and is a consultant for several companies preparing photovoltaic and agrovoltaic projects in the Czech Republic. At the same time, he is active in the development of legislation on agrovoltaics, which he believes is groundbreaking, but discriminates against some farmers to a certain extent, as it is so far possible to install agrovoltaics only over 6 selected agricultural crops.
