Wednesday 07-08-2019 - 13:31

Article by Peter Mihaylov (Country Manager, University of Sofia, Bulgaria)

It was a busy end of the semester at University of Sofia (UoS).

The SSO and SSO+ teams were busy finishing up the campaigns and preparing for the next academic year. But before the preparations for the 2019-2020 began, there was still the End of the year event for the winning dormitory of the SSO competition to be held. UoS organized a small “eco-gathering” party at the winning dormitory in the party room of Dormitory № 8, which won the competition by managing to save over 45 000 kWh of energy and thereby decreased its usage by a whooping 30 % compared to its 2016 baseline usage.

The event was attended by almost 50 students, all of whom turned out to be very enthusiastic about energy saving and climate change in general. Spontaneously, a heated discussion erupted about the next year’s campaign and what the students would do to further better performance and win again. The students were provided with drinks and snacks and seem to have a very good time. The event lasted for over 2 hours, during which the students were eager to learn about the project and how can they help in spreading the word out. This resulted in an impromptu SSO ambassador training session (good that all materials close by!). As a result, four students pledged to help in the 2019-2020 SSO campaign on the spot and another six said they will contact us at the beginning of the academic year once they know their detailed schedules. As a whole, the End of the year event proved to be a big success and marked the end of a campaign which had its ups and downs, but at the end managed to live up to the tasks which were put before it.

The UoS SAVES2 team was very happy to see students which are not only interested in the topic of energy savings and climate change, but are actually willing to do (and are doing) something about it. This gave a really strong boost to the team’s spirit, which will undoubtedly show during the 2019-2020 campaigns.