RESCOOP MECISE is short for Renewable Energy Sources COOPeratives Mobilizing European Citizens to Invest in Sustainable Energy. As European citizens and local authorities often lack time, financial means and technical expertise to initiate the necessary energy renovations of their houses and public buildings, the potential for energy efficiency projects remains largely untapped. RESCOOP MECISE will develop an integrated and innovative approach that gives answer to this impeding challenge. By integrating both renewable energy and energy efficiency projects into one innovative investment scheme RESCOOP MECISE will elaborate a completely new financing format. The financing scheme will make European citizens, REScoops, local authorities, the European Investment Bank and other related investment funds partners into the transition towards a more sustainable society. Moreover RESCOOP MECISE will encourage citizens and local authorities to initiate deep energy renovation projects by providing them with personal assistance and technical expertise that now remains with the REScoops. The RESCOOP MECISE project will also provide a clear cut solution for the financing problem that REScoops face when they want to start up with their first project. By means of setting up a European fund for both renewable energy and energy efficiency projects or through the development of a financial facilitation service for REScoops the REScoop MECISE project will enhance the potential for more successful energy efficiency projects throughout Europe.

REScoop Plus built on the knowledge and network of the REScoop 20-20-20 project. An interesting additional observation made in the project was that members of supplying REScoops change their behaviour reducing final energy consumption and investing money to produce RESenergy. The aim of the REScoop PLUS is therefore to get a better understanding and foster this behavioural change. It will identify and measure the best practices, share their knowledge, improve their activities in in their citizen’s engagement and energy efficiency actions and disseminate them to other supplying REScoops in Europe. The objective of REScoop PLUS is to make REScoops in Europe go beyond their activities of producing and supplying energy and take up energy savings for their members as a new pillar in their organisation. The largest supplying energy REScoops in Europe have recently taken up this task in several experimental projects, with different rates of success for different measures and geographies. The aim is now to go beyond the experimental phase and create a toolkit with a range of best practice products like communication tools, ICT tools for better measurements or new business models that support energy savings of consumers/members by changing the behaviour of consumers that are ready for market uptake by REScoops to implement into their organisation in order to reduce the CO2 footprint of their members.

Energy poverty is getting more and more poignant around Europe. According to the latest pan-European report by the EU Energy Poverty Observatory, 37.4M people were unable to keep warm in 2018, 33.8M had arrears on their utility bills, and 19% of households reported being uncomfortably hot during summer. Despite this issue being mainly addressed from the public policy perspective through measures that range from alleviation using social tariffs to subsidies to household refurbishment or purchasing energy efficient appliances, civil society plays a very significant and growing role. Communities have found different ways of getting together to fight energy poverty. Solidarity is the cornerstone of all these initiatives which have huge potential for replication. Renewable energy cooperatives (RESCOOPs) are the most democratic and oldest form of energy community: groups of citizens that get together in a democratic manner to achieve energy resilience, independence and sustainable energy generation and use. The CEES project identifies and analyses the most successful cases of community energy initiatives to tackle energy poverty in Europe, validates them academically and empirically, supports the overcoming of regulatory and financial barriers, and then creates a toolkit for EU replication through RESCOOPs network of +3000 energy communities, a formula which has proven very successful in the past. CEES will facilitate the adoption of behavioural and energy efficiency measures in households, create financial and non-financial support schemes to address energy poverty and empower community leaders (and organizations working in adjacent areas such as financial advice, health care or even fire and police services) to identify and deal with energy poverty, establishing quick and responsive networks. We expect to reach more than 19 000 energy poor households and trigger 2M€ of sustainable energy investment with savings of over 7,5 GWh/year.

By 2050, 98 million Europeans could become prosumers by joining an energy community. The REScoopVPP project combines front-runner energy communities to create the most advanced community-driven smart building ecosystem for energy communities. The ecosystem consists of a Community-driven Flexibility Box (COFY-Box) acting as smart home controller, and a set of community tools to support energy services for aggregators, ESCO’s, BRP’s and suppliers of RES. The COFY-box will be the first truly open and collaborative building controller, based on existing open source home automation technology with more than 1.400 integrations. The COFY-box will be affordable and easy to install. Community tools will enable energy communities to become real-time asset operators by employing demand and production forecasting algorithms, a dynamic pricing module for implicit DR and an OpenADR-based explicit DR solution. REScoopVPP solutions will undergo a large-scale experimentation in Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and the UK. The project will improve EV, PV and electric battery control, and will especially focus on the intelligent integration of thermal storage and hybrid heating solutions, capable of shifting fossil fuel consumption from legacy DHW and heating equipment to flexible renewable heat. Further attention will be given to smart plug control and the integration of equipment based on emerging EU-standards. This will improve comfort, while not adversely affecting original functionalities, quality and lifetime of the equipment. The ecosystem of REScoopVPP has the potential to impact 375.000 customers 5 years after the project and thus trigger primary energy savings of 559 GWh/year and improve the SRI of houses by 2 steps on average. To make sure that the ecosystem is viable, REScoopVPP will establish a dedicated legal entity that can bring solutions to the market and provide citizens with a European, community-driven alternative.

The aim of SCCALE 203050 (Sustainable Collective Citizen Action for a Local Europe) is to scale the growth of energy communities across Europe in the areas of energy efficiency, renewable energy production, district heating and more in households and non-residential buildings. Building on the experience of the cooperative movement and a wide range of cities and municipalities, we will: - Set up at least 25 energy communities, and directly support the replication of the SCCALE methodology in 34 additional communities - Develop a step-by-step guide for potential community leaders to support the creation, maturation and replication of energy communities. - Develop currently specific key performance indicators for community leaders and municipalities to assess the maturity and growth of the energy communities in their territories, and for external partners to assess a community's maturity and financial viability. - Gather proven technical tools and financing models suitable for citizen collective action. - Identify viable contractual models for energy communities and the involved stakeholders. - Encourage the proliferation of energy communities across Europe via a network of experts (including municipalities, SMEs, NGOs and academic institutions) to support new and existing energy communities. - Support policy makers at the European, national and local level in identifying suitable policies to foster the growth of energy communities in Europe through recommendations and discussions with policy makers.