TRAIN4SUSTAIN (T4S) will stimulate demand for skilled construction sector professionals (architects, contractors-SMEs and workers) through raising acceptance of regional and national qualifications and skills on the EU construction market. To this end, comparability of national qualifications and sustainable energy skills is key for increased transparency and penetration power in the market. T4S will tackle the issue of mutual recognition so that training accredited in one country is recognised easier in another country. Taking advantage of already available transnational energy skill qualification frameworks for building professions, like the BUILD UP Skills initiative, Prof/Trac scheme or the ones produced by the BIM community, and the recently developed EU framework for energy and resource efficient buildings (e.g. Level(s) ), T4S will focus on acting at market level. T4S project will foster a common understanding of sustainable energy skills across Europe by promoting a competence quality standard, a European Skills Registry and a Skills Passport for facilitating transnational recognition of learning outcomes and skill levels of existing qualifications and vocational trainings.

The INNOVEAS project is an initiative promoted by 10 partners, from 6 EU countries, to build and deliver a capacity building programme, aiming at addressing the major non-technical barriers that most often hamper the adoption the energy auditing practice, in particular among those actors, such as SMEs where such audits are not required by law. The ultimate goal is to consolidate a structured, permanent and expandable offer to help develop continuous self-sustainable services to raise awareness and build capacity in the field of energy auditing and related energy saving measures in SMEs. The project therefore aims at designing and deploying staff trainings and capacity building programmes to enhance corporate policy towards energy efficiency, energy culture (motivations, behaviour change, mitigation of perceived risks and barriers) and sustainable supply-chain initiatives. It therefore intends to: i) Advanced analysis of behavioural barriers to energy audits, to identify and analyse the enabling conditions and non-technical barriers hindering the adoption of energy auditing practice; ii) Delivery of self-sustainable capacity building programmes, in order to systematise awareness raising procedures to overcome the psychological and organisational barriers to energy audits in SMEs, deliver a training offer to SMEs and formulate a capacity building programme targeting stakeholders such as intermediaries, policy makers and financing institutes; iii) Create an institutional structure to sustain the project’s objectives and results and lay the basis for the creation and consolidation of a pan-European network of enablers likely to support in the coming years the growth and expansion of the training offer to on energy efficiency for European business.

REGEN-BY-2 will research, design, construct and experiment a first-of-its-kind lab-scale prototype of a recent near-worldwide patented thermodynamic cycle and related plant for the conversion of thermal sources in energy vectors, i.e. electric, heating and-or cooling powers. The start-up TIFEO, which was founded in 2018 by the team leading this proposal and is the exclusive licensee of the patent driving REGEN-BY-2, is a potential European Unicorn. REGEN-BY-2 can convert (from small to large-scale) any typology of renewable thermal source from low to high-temperature (e.g. solar, aerothermal, geothermal, hydrothermal) including additional thermal sources (e.g. waste heat). REGEN-BY-2 is enabled by machines capable to work with two-phase fluids, i.e. constituted by both liquid and vapor phases. The patented thermodynamic cycle is highly efficient as it is constituted by a proper combination of Carnot cycles operating with two-phase fluid circulating in novel two-phase expanders and two-phase compressors. To be

NewTREND seeks to improve the energy efficiency of the existing European building stock and to improve the current renovation rate by developing a new participatory integrated design methodology targeted to the energy retrofit of buildings and neighbourhoods, establishing energy performance as a key component of refurbishments. The methodology will foster collaboration among stakeholders in the value chain, engaging occupants and building users and supporting all the refurbishment phases through the whole life cycle of the renovation. The methodology will be supported by an online platform to ease collaborative design, which will play the role of exchanging information and facilitating dialogue between the different stakeholders involved in the retrofit process. It will store all the information useful to the design of the retrofit intervention in a cloud based interoperable data exchange server, i.e. the District Information Model server, which has the ability to and export multiple file formats thanks to semantic web technologies. A Data Manager tool will be developed to guide the designers in the data collection phase, which might be a complex task for retrofit projects where information and drawings are scattered or even not available. The NewTREND platform will be a tool for collaborative design allowing evaluation of different design options at both building and district level through dynamic simulations via a Simulation & Design Hub. Design options, including district schemes and shared renewables will be presented to the design team, together with available financing schemes and applicable business models, in a library which will build on lessons from past and ongoing R&D projects. The NewTREND methodology and tools will be validated in three real refurbishment projects in Hungary, Finland and Spain where the involvement of all the stakeholders in the design .process, will be evaluated and specific activities will be dedicated to inhabitants and users