With its “Clean Energy for all Europeans” package (CEP), the European Commission formally recognised and instrumentally brought forward community energy projects, including definitions for “Renewable Energy Communities” (RECs) and for “Citizen Energy Communities” (CECs). The new concepts introduced in the CEP set the course for a more active role of EU citizens in the energy markets. To fully concretize the benefits envisioned by the CEP, a myriad of barriers needs to be overcome and progress needs to be done to clarify and streamline the concepts of REC and CEC, enabling its uptake by all interested citizens. Motivated by that challenge, COMMUNITAS will promote energy citizenship, enabling citizens to take control of their own path towards sustainability by becoming an active element of the energy markets. The project will deliver a Knowledge Base that will provide users with technical, administrative, and legal information on ECs, streamlining the creation and expansion of this concept. COMMUNITAS will also deliver an innovative set of tools - capitalizing on technologies such as IoT, Blockchain and Cloud Computing - to unlock citizens’ active participation in energy markets and communities (all integrated into an open, digital “one-stop-shop” COMMUNITAS Core Platform (CCP)), allowing EC members to have an aggregated position in the energy markets or explore ancillary services using different energy assets or load profiles of the community. As a project that aims to position citizens in the centre of energy markets, COMMUNITAS has citizens at the centre of its own approach: citizens will be involved in Social and Policy Labs throughout the whole project, in order to frequently factor in their feedback, wishes, needs into the core developments of the project.

Recognizing the significance of energy efficiency in industry and carbon emissions reduction, FLEXHYON is proposing a clever combination of alternative fully electrified heating systems (microwave, heat pumps, ultrasound) to tackle three specific industrial processes: ultrafast drying of compact material, drying of granular materials and distillation/extraction of ground material to address their urgent need to transition from fossil energy to renewable and low-carbon energy sources. Three optimized prototypes will be built and demonstrated in 3 industrial environments: ceramics, feed production, biomass. The quality and economic impact of the developments will be evaluated using LCA and LCC; environmental and technical performances, health protection, safety will be demonstrated and validated. Sound market strategies will be developed, giving clear indications on scalability, transferability and replicability across different industrial sectors, commercialization and deployment will be achieved through development and validation of set of business models for the 3 business cases. The FLEXHYON solutions will exhibit significantly higher energy efficiency in comparison to traditional fossil fuel-based heating technologies, therefore leading to a reduction in GHG emissions, maximizing primary energy savings, and enabling higher production flexibility (e.g. production on-demand, production on-site). Their scalability (upscaling, downscaling) will allow to better follow market demand and enable leaner production paradigms. To achieve the project goals, FLEXHYON combines 9 partners covering the whole technical value chain required for the development and validation of alternative fully electrified heating systems. The Consortium will also implement different dissemination and communication activities to raise awareness about the benefits of alternative heating systems in industry and exploitation opportunities from know-how generated and exploitable results developed.

The DigiFab consortium will develop a renovation process consisting of: 1) Digital process chain with detailed assessment and co-creation methodology to cover the entire renovation workflow; 2) Choice of adaptable prefabricated modules with passive and active technologies to achieve near zero energy building (NZEB) levels and reduced environmental impact; 3) Assessment and monitoring software with building information modelling (BIM) to automate the process. Estimated installation time is 2 days per unit of 200m2 surface, with 30% less cost than conventional renovation. Our solution transforms the renovation process by digitizing it from design brief to finalization. The approach, not widely adopted in the sector, offers significant cost and time reduction by accurately collecting and centralizing data at all stages, minimizing uncertainties that cause delays and increase costs. Co-creation with occupants gathers expectations and best renovation times. Building data is collected with accurate methods, transformed into a high-quality digital twin that automates energy and structural analysis, leading to design optimization with the best technology combinations according to project inputs. Results from the analysis are used directly to manufacture the prefabricated modules using modern methods of construction (MMC) and “just in time” (JIT). The modules use novel lightweight concrete mixes with recycled materials, bio-based materials, active envelope heating technologies, energy generation and management including ventilation. Installation follows specific site conditions, monitored through procedures such as laser scanning. A worksite solution is used to manage and monitor levels of construction demolition waste, and noise. At the end of the commissioning process, energy performance documentation is provided. Three demonstration sites in Spain, Austria and Greece with diverse building typologies will showcase how the DigiFab solution benefits stakeholders.

Despite emotions being a driver of political choices, building democratically meaningful emotional narratives in politics remains an uncharted territory. Hence the main venture of ENCODE is to decode the meanings of emotions and encode them to policy-making strategies aiming for a positive emotional turn, breaking the cycle of depolarisation. To meet this ambitious goal, ENCODE builds its conceptual frameworks arising from a novel concept of affective pluralisation, as opposed to affective polarisation. This term serves to frame empirical research carried out in 6 geographically diverse European countries, representing both EU member states and candidates. This study will span desk research, sentiment analysis, biometric research, in-depth interviews, experiments and panel survey. Such triangulation of research techniques ensures the accuracy and validity of the findings. These are further encoded into main outputs: catalogue of best practice to tackle disinformation in social media, emotional gap maps, validated survey questions and democratic resilience heatmaps. These outputs are not expected only to enhance current scientific framework, but also are planned to underpin the future emotional narratives co-designed by diverse groups of citizens in innovations labs and further validated by Delphi expert panels and vignette experiments. This bottom-up approach anchored in citizen science ensures that policy-making strategy are in first place created by citizens and only in the next step discussed by expert teams who will elaborate policy-making strategies, the roadmap for their implementation, alongside future foresight scenarios which will be disseminated widely across EU and EU wide community of 1000+ members. This strategy creates emotional bonds between ordinary citizens, increases trust in governance and supports better informed political decision-making and communication.

The built environment is ill-prepared for more frequent and increasingly intense climate-related extreme events. These cause severe socio-economic losses and adversely affects public health. Recent scientific and technological advances in the construction industry provide timely solutions for improving the resilience of buildings for specific hazards, but these are often not cost effective or eco-friendly. There is a lack of frameworks for assessing the climate resilience, making it challenging to develop optimal solutions for multi-hazard scenarios. MULTICARE will address this challenge by developing innovative multi-criteria decision-support frameworks and providing plug & play low-carbon resilient technologies for improving the multi-hazard resilience of our built environment in a cost-effective, reliable and sustainable manner. A suite of multi-disciplinary digital services and tools will be developed for multi-hazard resilience assessment, design, operation and management across multiple scales (material, component, building, neighbourhood/district). This will enable stakeholders to make more informed decisions to select materials/solutions and build resilient supply chains, even in case of cultural heritage buildings. We will demonstrate our results in large-scale pilots (3 buildings, 4 neighbourhoods/cities) in different countries with diverse conditions. A user-centred, inclusive and participatory approach will be consistently implemented at all stages of the project for citizens engagement and for extending the durability of MULTICARE impact. To achieve the project goals, MULTICARE combines 21 partners covering the whole technical value chain required for solutions in resilient and sustainable buildings. The Consortium includes experience in social sciences, user engagement and training. The Consortium will support clustering activities with other projects aimed at sharing knowledge, experience, and raising public awareness of climate resilience.