ATELIER is a smart city project that demonstrates Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) within 8 European cities with sustainability and carbon neutrality as guiding ambitions. Amsterdam and Bilbao are the Lighthouse cities that will generate an energy surplus of 1340 MWh of primary energy, prevent 1,7 kt of CO2- and 23 t of NOx-emissions, and invest 156 mln Euros to realise their PEDs. Together with district users, ATELIER will showcase innovative solutions that integrate buildings with smart mobility and energy technologies to create a surplus of energy and balance the local energy system. Bratislava, Budapest, Copenhagen, Krakow, Matosinhos, and Riga are the Fellow cities that will replicate and adapt successful solutions. All cities will establish a local PED Innovation Atelier to co-produce locally embedded, smart urban solutions. In the ateliers, the local innovation ecosystem (authorities, industries, knowledge institutes, citizens) is strengthened, enhancing embeddedness and removing any obstacles (legal, financial, social, etc.) for implementation of the smart solutions. The Innovation Ateliers are designed to be self-sustaining and to live on after the project has ended. The ateliers are engines for upscaling solutions within the ATELIER-cities and replication to other EU-cities. ATELIER integrates a high degree of citizen engagement throughout the project, by actively involving local residents (>9000), local initiatives, and energy communities in activities to align technical solutions with citizens’ objectives and behaviour. Each of the cities will develop a City Vision 2050 that creates the roadmap for upscaling the solutions in the long term. ATELIER has the ambition to pave the way for “energy positive cities” in Europe. All ATELIER activities will be monitored (socially and technically), and lessons learned are systematically drawn and disseminated to relevant SET-plan groups, city networks, and innovation forums.

AI spreading in the energy sector is expected to dramatically reshape energy value chain in the next years, by improving business processes performance, while increasing environmental sustainability, strengthening social relationships and propagating high social value among citizens. However, uncertain business cases, fragmented regulations, standards immaturity and low-technical SMEs workforce skills barriers are actually hampering the full exploitation of AI along the energy value chain. I-NERGY will deliver: (i) Financing support through Open Calls to third parties SMEs for new energy use cases and technology building blocks validation, as well as for developing new AI-based energy services, while fully aligning to AI4EU service requirements and strengthening the SME competitiveness on AI for energy; (b) An open modular framework for supporting AI-on-Demand in the energy sector by capitalising on state-of-the-art AI, IoT, semantics, federated learning, analytics tools, which leverage on edge-level AI-based cross-sector multi-stakeholder sovereignty and regulatory preserving interoperable data handling. I-NERGY aims at evolving, scaling up and demonstrating innovative AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) Energy Analytics Applications and digital twins services that will be validated along 9 pilots, which: (a) Span over the full energy value chain, ranging from optimised management of grid and non-grid RES assets, improved efficiency and reliability of electricity networks operation, optimal risk assessment for energy efficiency investments planning, optimising local and virtual energy communities involvement in flexibility and green energy marketplaces; (b) Delivers other energy and non-energy services to realise synergies among energy commodities (district heating, buildings) and with non-energy sectors (i.e. e-mobility, personal safety/security, AAL), and with non- or low-technical domains end users (i.e. elderly people).

ExPEDite aims to create and deploy a novel Digital Twin (DT) for real-time monitoring, visualization, and management of district-level energy flows. The project will deliver a suite of replicable modeling tools, allowing stakeholders to analyze planning actions towards positive energy and climate neutrality in a cost-effective manner. The tools will be able to model the district’s energy production and demand, building stock performance, optimize for flexibility and simulate mobility and transport. The DT’s design-platform will analyze various what-if planning actions, aiding energy and urban planners’ evidence-based decision-making processes, while its run-time engine will optimize the districts energy utilization efficiency. The DT will follow a modular open architecture to support multi-sectoral and multi-organizational stakeholder requirements. By employing gamification and co-creation approaches, the project will enhance public awareness and engagement in energy efficiency. The ExPEDite DT will be applied to a district in Riga, Latvia, and will provide practical guidelines, reusable models, algorithms, and training materials to aid other cities in replicating the DT for their districts, fostering widespread adoption of sustainable energy practices.

INNOVATE will overcome market barriers to deep energy-efficient retrofits of private housing stock by developing and rolling out integrated energy efficiency (EE) service packages targeting homeowners in 11 target territories from 10 EU Member States (NL, DK, BE, LV, CZ, CY, SE, IT, ES and UK). An integrated EE service package includes: • Development of products adapted to consumers’ concerns • Marketing & communication • Independent advice and technical assistance. • Tailor-made financial advice • Coordination of a chain of suppliers / contractors • Ensuring high quality standards • Long-term and affordable financing The packages, developed by local and regional authorities and/or private sector stakeholders, in cooperation with financing institutions and investors, will be tested on 117 pilot buildings, aiming at min. 50% energy savings. These pilot projects are expected to mobilise 37.41 MEUR of private investments, trigger primary energy savings of 5.38 GWh/year and 3.14 GWh/year of renewable energy production. INNOVATE will widely disseminate successful business models and innovative financing schemes tested by project partners and those identified thanks to an extensive analysis of enabling conditions and EU best practices. 4,000 stakeholders and potential replicators will be reached via 61 EU and national capacity building events, policy meetings and communication/media tools. Recommendations on how to remove legal, financial, technical and organisational barriers hindering the implementation of the packages in target territories will influence 12 EU, national and regional policies in order to ensure the viability of these packages.

EnergyGuard aims to develop, kickstart and sustain an open, green and robust Testing Experimentation Facility operating under real-world conditions to empower innovators in bringing trustworthy AI products to the energy market in a cost-effective manner. It will integrate five significant European large-scale testing and experimentation facilities that cover the full energy value chain,supported by European’s greenest HPC infrastructure (Meluxina). This includes a digital twin (DT) of the Portuguese Transmission Network (RDN), the CEDER-CIEMAT Microgrid with its Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), the Hydrogen testing platforms at CEA LITEN, CARTIF, BER and CIEMAT, a high-fidelity local DT of Riga's multi-apartment residential buildings and the Antrodoco Renewable Energy Community. This includes a wide range of elements to cover diverse AI test needs,including wind power, photovoltaic systems, hydropower plant, AEM,PEM and SO eletrolysers, fuel cells, EV charging stations, electric and public buses and battery storage systems. The facilities will be accessible to EnergyGuard end-users through a set of properly configured Digital Twins (DTs) and curated assets, including data, models, inference APIs, services, and applications through a AI development Testing environment. It will enable easy seamless access to assets from the EU ecosystem including AIOD, Data Spaces, DIHs and other TEFs; Moreover, EnergyGuard facilitates users to validate their products with an Acceptance Environment and a common open AI risks database for a wide range of cybersecurity and trustworthy AI assessments. The TEF will serve as full infrastructure to support national AI regulatory sandbox initiatives and deliver 5 pilot cases for the private and public sector. EnergyGuard will build upon a long-term, self-sustainable business model driven by a new entity, incorporating market-ready features early in the design, such as a subscription/plan framework, billing, and professional support