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PV Impact will try out a variety of approaches to stimulate the private sector to spend more on PV research, development and innovation in Europe. The part of the project will focus on inviting companies to matchmaking events so they can make new connections and find partners with whom to work on their plans. The project will also target two specific industrial companies: one, ENEL Green Power, will try to make progress on the Implementation Plan by coordinating the many different PV actors in Italy; the other, Photowatt, will work mostly privately but tap the consortium's expertise and those of scientists whom it will select to help it make the right strategic technical choices to be a serious competitor in PV manufacturing. Another important part of the project is to monitor progress in PV. Data will be collected on public spending in the EU, on private spending, on the kinds of projects being funded and on the overall performance of PV technology. Forecasts for future spending will be made according to various scenarios. The project will track whether improvements in the performance of technology are keeping pace with expectations. It will make recommendations to European funding authorities on how they can play their part in putting European PV technology back the top of the class if it is falling behind.

The renowned European hydropower industry and its know-how can foster the transition into a more sustainable energy system in parts of the world that still need support to develop the sector. While the European hydropower market does not allow huge developments, some countries present a big potential. HYPOSO will provide strategic support and tools for the European hydropower industry to boost their export of products and services to markets in Africa and Latin America, especially those with a high market potential hydro sector, i.e. Bolivia, Cameroon, Columbia, Ecuador and Uganda. The project will develop solutions which can be easily implemented for overcoming barriers to the broad deployment of hydropower solutions in these export markets. The consortium will bring representatives of the European hydropower industry together with their counterparts and politicians from Africa and Latin America. It will provide political, legal, technical and strategic advice while considering the regional specificities, socio-economic, spatial and environmental aspects all along the life-cycle of hydropower projects. Experts of the consortium will identify pilot hydropower projects and provide capacity building for local stakeholders and politicians. Communications activities such as brochures, events, and workshops highlighting European state-of-the-art technology will complement these measures. Moreover, a website will be created. It will serve as an information hub for the European hydropower industry and useful source of information for hydropower stakeholders worldwide. The outcome of the HYPOSO project will contribute to the promotion of the European hydropower industry, paving the way for better investment conditions in the targeted countries and increasing the share of renewable energy in these regions. It will support the development of policies, market supports and financial frameworks at the local, national and regional level for hydropower facilities.

Since 2007, the initial deployment of CSP/STE in Spain has brought the European STE sector to be a worldwide technology leader. But the further deployment has been hindered in Europe since 2013 due to the retroactive changes in the investment conditions in Spain. To unlock this situation, the EC has launched in 2015 a dedicated Initiative – Initiative for Global Leadership in Concentrated Solar Power (CSP). This Initiative, focusing on 2 targets (a cost reduction target and an innovation target), was adopted in 2016 within the SET-Plan structures. A working group gathering representatives from several SET-Plan countries and the STE stakeholders from both industry and research sectors was set up to define a corresponding Implementation Plan (IP), which was officially adopted in June 2017, including 12 R&D action line and the implementation of new innovative, so-called First-Of-A-Kind (FOAK) plants. Thus, as response to the call H2020- LC-SC3-JA-2-2018, this project proposal aims at supporting the full implementation of the a.m. Initiative taking into consideration the political, legislative and institutional as well as the market backgrounds put in perspective to the situation of the STE sector in 2018 – 2 years after the “Initiative” was presented and the corresponding “IP” adopted by the SET-Plan Steering Group. Building bridges to other ongoing projects (MUSTEC, SMARTSPEND, etc), the project will propose solutions and pathways for relevant countries to overcome the main shortcomings of current national strategies related to STE that are: a) for the industry the framework conditions for procurement of manageable RES, and b) for the R&I sector, the extension to more public funding agencies and other sources for the funding of a.m. R&I projects. This will result in national country reports and events as well as an EU-wide cooperation report/event to be extensively covered by national mainstream media and supported by a strong dissemination and political communication campaign.

The European energy market is rapidly changing under the influence of three megatrends that currently drive the transformation of energy sectors worldwide: decarbonization, decentralization and digitalization. These megatrends have stimulated several technical and social innovations in the energy sector, which offer alternatives to the traditional business model of large centralized energy utilities and have the potential to further the goals of the Energy Union. One such example of social innovation in the energy sector are new forms of local energy communities that generate, store and use energy in a collaborative way and hence allow consumers to get involved in the production and storage of energy (“prosumage”) at the local level. New clean energy communities in a changing European energy system (NEWCOMERS) are often democratic and participatory in nature and at the same time characterized by unconventional alliances of actors, the use of innovative and smart technologies and new forms of value creation for their members and society. The NEWCOMERS project aims to investigate which regulatory, institutional and social conditions, at the national and local level, are favorable for the emergence and operation of new clean energy communities. Furthermore, NEWCOMERS will explore how these new clean energy communities meet their members’(i.e. citizens’ and consumers’) needs better than more traditional energy services business models and whether they have the potential to increase the affordability of energy, their members’ energy literacy and efficiency in the use of energy, as well as their members’ and society’s support for the clean energy transition. The ultimate goal of the NEWCOMERS project is to identify the types of clean energy communities that perform best along a variety of dimensions, such as resilience, citizen engagement, security, efficiency and affordability, while being based on sustainable business models that have the potential to be scaled-up.

There are large knowledge gaps around the governance of the low carbon energy system transition in a smooth and participative way, ensuring that citizens are at the centre of the required fundamental transformation and enabling the full efflorescence of their creative potential. Social innovation is a prime way to tap into that potential while Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs), a social innovation in itself, are a prime way to mobilize people and to ensure the acceptance for and participation in the necessary transition process. However, both social innovation and CAIs lack proper scientific and field-tested understanding of their development and factors for success. As of today, the role of citizen-driven CAIs (e.g. energy communities, cooperatives, purchasing groups) and their contribution to the energy transition has neither been quantified at an aggregate level, nor has their contribution potential been estimated or understood in sufficient depth. The COMETS project aims to fill these knowledge gaps by quantifying the European-wide aggregate contribution of CAIs to the energy transition at national and European levels by investigating their evolution and scaling up at an in-depth level in six selected countries. The main expected impacts of the project are two-fold. Firstly, COMETS will advance the scientific knowledge on the motives, desires, objectives and barriers of such collective action initiatives and their historical and future role in the energy transition. Building on the information gathered and tested for its robustness, we will then co-develop and test supportive tools together with CAI members, decision makers and the scientific community. Lastly, these stakeholders will then be able to exploit the main outputs of COMETS, namely a Supporting Platform for CAIs, the enhanced knowledge base, scenarios and roadmaps for spreading CAI models, even after the project is concluded.

The EMB3Rs project will implement a bottom-up, user-driven and open source modelling platform to simulate alternative supply-demand scenarios for the recovery and reuse of industrial excess heat and cold (HC). EMB3Rs’ final users will employ the platform to determine the costs and benefits related with excess HC utilization routes, and to define the required implementation conditions for the most promising solutions. The platform will allow industrial users and other relevant stakeholders to autonomously and intuitively explore and assess the feasibility of new technology and business scenarios. This will benefit each individual producer/ consumer in a given industrial community but also enable win-win solutions between industries and final HC users in other sectors. The main aim is to reuse and/or trade excess thermal energy in a holistic perspective within an industrial process HC/energy system environment or framed in an HC network in regulated or liberalized markets. The resource and energy intensive industries (REII) and DHC networks will be able to use and rely on the EMB3Rs platform to investigate the revenue potential of using industrial excess HC as an energy (re)source. The REII will be able to evaluate the benefits of investing in low carbon options, such as the integration of renewable HC technologies and thermal storage, in industrial processes. Ultimately, by translating industrial excess HC into savings, revenues and increased overall system efficiency, EMB3Rs will allow the REII community to improve its competitiveness, foster and accelerate the decarbonisation of the HC market overall and contribute to the EU climate change mitigation goals. Namely by i) contributing to overcome the barriers for developing and deploying in HC solutions, i.e. reaching a critical mass of users, iii) identifying critical framework conditions and success factors and iv) promoting transfer and replication of solutions in other industrial sectors and iv) stimulating the convergence between energy, energy efficiency goals, CO2 reduction and business interests.

The overall aim of sEEnergies is to quantify and operationalise the potentials for energy efficiency (EE) in buildings, transport and industry, combining this bottom-up knowledge with temporal and spatial analyses to develop an innovative, holistic and research-based EE-modelling approach going beyond current state-of-the-art science based knowledge and methodologies. Because the changes in one energy sector can contribute to impacts in another sector, it is only possible to have a comprehensive assessment and quantification of the EEFP policies impacts if we look at the energy systems from a holistic point of view and take into consideration the synergies between sectors. Therefore bottom-up sectorial approach and grid assessment, together with energy system modelling and spatial analytics is combined in the novel EE modelling approach. To achieve its aim, sEEnergies comprises a combination of in-depth knowledge on the consumption side and in-depth analyses of the energy systems that enables a detailed scientifically based pool of knowledge needed to make EE potentials concrete and operational, and as a resource on its own. Embedded in the applied project methodology is the identification of synergies across the supply chain and towards additional impacts not directly linked to the energy system. This nonenergy impacts can be very important benefits that are often invisible but which sEEnergies aims to operationalise to a larger extent on a sectoral, system and member state level. For each sector we will take as starting point the state-of-the-art including best practices, policies in place and energy and nonenergy impacts of EE, for the EU and for the 28 Member States. In order to maximise the outreach of sEEnergies’ results and the understanding of their importance, an online and user friendly GIS platform will be developed where EE impacts can be geographically visualised.

SONNET aims to create an inter- and transdisciplinary understanding of the diversity and processes of social innovations in the energy sector (SIE). It assesses - critically and reflexively- the success, contributions and future potential of SIE towards sustainable energy transitions in Europe. SONNET investigates how, to what extent and under which enabling conditions diverse types of SIE may result in new breakthroughs or successfully help to overcome transition barriers; such as limited citizen engagement or slow adoption of new technologies. SONNET’s empirical research is informed by a novel conceptual framework combining insights from sustainability transitions, energy studies and social innovation literatures. It bridges qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches in an innovative multi-method research design. Across 30 qualitative in-depth case studies situated in six European countries, SONNET investigates the diversity, processes, success and contributions of SIE. Given its focus on urban areas as major hubs for SIE, SONNET conducts six transdisciplinary SIE city labs to experiment with new forms of SIE and learn about how multiple actors can harness the potential of SIE. In addition, based on three large-scale representative citizen surveys, SONNET assesses the future potential of SIE and derives implications for reconfiguring existing and developing new business models. SONNET synthesizes its findings in an integrated knowledge framework for a socio-economic, socio-cultural (incl. gender) and socio-political understanding of enabling and impeding conditions for SIE and SIE contributions when working towards accelerating sustainable energy transitions in Europe. Through a cutting edge co-creation, dissemination and exploitation strategy, SONNET ensures that its practical recommendations, tools and capacity building activities have a maximum impact on its key stakeholders such as citizens, SIE actors, policy makers, and businesses.

The SETWind project supports the implementation of the SET-Plan Implementation Plan for Offshore Wind. The proposal has been developed in consultation with the Temporary Working group that authored the Implementation Plan and key stakeholder organisations including ETIPWIND, WindEurope, the EERA Joint Programme for Wind Energy, the IEA Wind TCP and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Petten. The SETWind project will update and work with the Implementation Plan to maintain it as a dynamic reference point for offshore wind energy research and innovation; it will monitor and report on progress towards the Implementation Plan targets of 1090 million € to be invested in R&I in the offshore sector until 2030; it will strengthen policy coordination in European offshore wind energy R&I policy by supporting the work of the SET-Plan Implementation Group for Offshore Wind; and it will facilitate a breakthrough in the coordination across borders of nationally funded R&I projects. The SETWind project will be run in the same spirit as it was developed: as a collaborative efforts bringing in European and international stakeholders to translate the Implementation Plan into a living document by updating the research and innovation priorities and implementing these together with relevant stakeholders through nationally funded projects coordinated across borders.

Realising an accelerated expansion of renewable energy will require a switch from centralised to decentralised energy production and greater social participation, together known as energy democracy. The increase in energy democracy and social equity will be an essential part of the clean energy transition. A transition that could represent one of the most fundamental social, economic and technical changes in modern history. The most common businesses associated with social innovation in the renewable energy sector are Cooperatives, Aggregators and Crowdfunding platforms. These businesses facilitate consumers to take a more active role in the electricity system. Achieving sustained growth in energy democracy requires a better understanding of support structures for successful social innovation across technical, legal and economic systems. SocialRES aims to devise more effective ways of increasing social innovation leading to greater social acceptability as well as more durable governance arrangements and socioeconomic benefits. Through research excellence and co-creation of knowledge with relevant stakeholders, SocialRES will develop socially innovative and inclusive strategies for the energy system of the future. SocialRES will supplement the existing fragmented data on social innovations with new understandings from businesses, end-users and stakeholders to provide a comprehensive evidence base for policy design. The project will employ innovative techniques such as a Peer to Peer (P2P) crowd-investing for renewable energy sources (RES) projects, P2P lending and P2P virtual RES energy aggregator platform. The SocialRES team combines partners from a range of disciplines together with industry expertise to develop a comprehensive understanding of the strengths and limitations of the current renewable energy system to foster social innovation and to shape a roadmap for a future, more innovative and equitable system.