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.

The main aim of NRG2peers is to support the uptake of a next generation of European peer-to-peer Energy Communities. NRG2peers sets up a gamified platform in three levels, supporting residential energy communities to increase energy efficiency and to integrate a higher share of renewable energy. The NRG2peers platform aims to support the uptake and multiplication of attractive, financially, legally and technically viable, user-centred residential energy communities in three concrete ways: Level 1: Collecting experiences from operative peer-to-peer energy communities, whose assessment schemes are already compliant with national and EU legislations, in a way to deliver Readiness Level Framework Indicators (Organisational, Institutional, Market, Technological, Social) which helps to assess a communities’ readiness to become a peer-to-peer, peer-to-community and peer-to-market (P2P, P2C, P2M) energy community, to incite investments from the public and private sector at the local level, and to support decision making and policy at the MS and EU level to ensure a prosumer-friendly environment; Level 2: Providing smart demand-response mechanisms to optimize energy consumption and peak demand at the community level. The NRG2peers platform will adopt peer-to-peer privacy-aware learning mechanisms to ensure energy optimisation whereby three main aims are 1) Financial savings for the residential customers at community level 2) CO2 and environmental savings at the community level, and 3) Local self-reliance in terms of energy; Level 3: Adopting community-based nudging mechanisms for peer-to-peer transaction of renewable energy and motivating the maximal implementation and consumption of (local) RES production and consumption. By combining 3 levels with gamified features supporting peer-to-peer behavioural-based incentives, the NRG2peers platform targets for global energy and CO2 emission savings at the community level, and investment triggered in sustainable energy in EU.