The 20% primary energy consumption reduction targets set by the European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), published in 2012, call for effective and wide-scale building heating and cooling systems upgrade strategies. These will be successful only if they base upon the right combination of technology innovation, industrial commitment and building owners awareness. In line with this statement, THERMOSS proposes an industry-focused, innovation-intensive approach to ease and foster the introduction of cutting-edge heating and cooling technologies for building energy retrofitting at European level, targeting residential buildings and buildings connected to District Heating and Cooling (DHC) networks. The aim of THERMOSS is to define a set of retrofitting heating and cooling packages based on cutting-edge, high-potential, market-ready technologies that are connected together thanks to an open ICT platform for smart energy management at building and district-level. The THERMOSS technologies have been picked out from the catalogs of prominent European industrial players, Bosch, Veolia, Exergy, Schneider Electric taking into account business profitability, energy efficiency and potential for large-scale deployment. They will be tuned, combined and sized as part of the project thanks to dedicated tools, to optimize their joint impact. THERMOSS advocates a geo-clustered approach to the definition of these packages, in order to increase the impact of the solutions with respect to specific climatic conditions and – when applicable – specific National policies (e.g. fiscal incentives) and regulations. The THERMOSS packages and the platform will be thoroughly demonstrated in seven experimental and demonstration sites, covering all the dimensions highlighted by the call: residential buildings, district heating and cooling networks, in different climatic zones.

PACE is a major initiative aimed at ensuring the European mCHP sector makes the next move to mass market commercialisation. The project will deploy a total of 2,650 new fuel cell microCHP units with real customers and monitor them for an extended period. This will: - Enable fuel cell mCHP manufacturers to scale up production, using new series techniques, and increased automation. By 2018, four leading European manufacturers (Bosch, SOLIDpower, Vaillant and Viessmann) will have installed capacity for production of over 1,000 units/year (each will install over 500 units in PACE). These production lines will test the manufacturing techniques which will allow for mass market scale up and the reductions in unit cost which will come from associated economies of scale. - Allow the deployment of new innovations in fuel cell microCHP products, which reduce unit cost by over 30%, increase stack lifetime to over 10 years (by end of the project) and improve the electrical efficiency of all units. - Create a large dataset of the performance of the units, which will demonstrate the readiness of fuel cell mCHP as a mass market product. This will prove that fuel cell mCHP can be a leading contributor to reducing primary energy consumption and GHG emissions across Europe. - Allow the units in the trial to be pooled in a large scale test of the concept of aggregating and controlling the output from mCHP to act as a virtual power plant. This will be achieved in a project run by EWE on a section of the German grid earmarked for smart grid trials. - Act as the basis for an effort to standardise mCHP products in Europe, helping create a more efficient market for both installers and component suppliers. The project will provide an evidence base which will be used in a dissemination campaign targeting policy makers (who can provide supportive policies for the next wave of mCHP roll-out) and increasing awareness of the technology within the domestic heating sector (main route to market).

InterConnect envisages to contribute for the democratization of efficient energy management, through a flexible and interoperable ecosystem where demand side flexibility can be soundly integrated with effective benefits to end-users. In fact, over the last few years several projects and technology providers have come up with solutions that allow every energy user to have awareness and control over his appliances, but there has always been a major issue with interoperability. End-users should be able to choose and change their technology providers, without having to replace their installation, every time they feel this need and still be able to adopt sustainable behaviour and benefit from technological advances. In the energy sector, a steep move towards digital is occurring and becoming tremendously user-centric and market-driven. The system dimension is significant, as the number of energy service providers is increasing thanks to favourable regulatory environment and technology advancements for monitoring and control. This is the reason why this consortium integrates relevant partners from all the representative stakeholders in this new energy paradigm. Specific competences in ICT, IoT, energy, data science, software, were included and the full value chain, from R&D institutions, manufacturers, DSO, retailers, IT providers, and energy users is represented. To guarantee a higher Europe-wide impact, several relevant associations related with ICT and energy are also involved. To achieve a significant dimension, 7 large scale pilots, in different countries and with different end-users, are foreseen to guarantee representativeness and dimension in terms of number of appliances and services. The overarching objective of these pilots is to demonstrate a real digital market environment over electrical systems with significant amounts of DSF, reducing operational and investment costs that will benefit energy end-users and help EU achieve its energy efficiency objectives.