save@work focusses on overcoming the barriers to energy saving practices in public office buildings and changing the behaviour of public sector employees at work place. A minimum of 9000 employees in at least 180 public office buildings (administrative buildings - municipal/regional or federal state operated) from nine countries will compete in a year-long energy saving contest to achieve the highest energy savings possible compared to the previous year. Throughout the competition participants will benefit from expert knowledge provided by the partners; a web-based Energy Saving Online Tool (feedback system) which helps to visualise actual energy consumption and savings made by each building; tailor made information and campaign materials and the exchange of experience with other participants. The energy saving competition between public office buildings is embedded in an energy quality management system: Analysis – Development of Measures – Implementation – Monitoring and Continuation, which ensures an individual, professional goal-oriented and sustainable approach for realising energy savings. It is projected that the project will lead to 13 GWh primary energy saved and 3,100 t of CO2 avoided in public buildings across Europe. Support from behavioural change experts and an accompanying evaluation of the implemented measures and results will help provide important insights useful for both project implementation as well as future initiatives in this field. Factors of success, barriers and the impact of the project in respect to mid- and long-term changes will be analysed. Project activities and results will be disseminated through a wide communication campaign to the public, as well as other stakeholders in public administrations and academic institutions. By providing a complete set of strategies and materials needed to replicate this project, our goal is to inspire others to follow our lead and develop energy efficient offices of the future.

The Clean Energy for all Europeans package paves the way for an energy revolution by putting the consumer in the driving seat of the green transition process. Energy communities offer the unique opportunity for consumers to form critical mass and become renewable energy producers and offer their demand flexibility to the market. However, the current requirements of becoming a prosumer bear a crucial risk that ultimately there will be a two-speed energy world: those who have the knowledge, access and opportunity to become a prosumer, and those who lack the resources, know-how, education or time to participate in and benefit from the new opportunities. Therefore, there is a clear need to support local heroes (i.e. those interested in setting up collective actions) in establishing their energy community and enable them to motivate and target consumers directly. This is particularly important for countries where energy communities are yet to be established. The concept of SHAREs is simple and straightforward: create a SHAREs Gateway for local heroes to help them initiate an action and grow, which consists of: (1) A country-specific implementation toolkit to equip local heroes with the technical and logistic capacity to set up their energy community (legal framework, such as master contracts, technical and IT solutions, business models, etc.); (2) The building blocks of a tailored “pick-and-mix” communication campaign to enable local heroes to promote their idea effectively to their most relevant consumer groups. The SHAREs Gateway combines the insights and tools from existing initiatives as well as input of established energy communities (pioneers) and policy developers. After having been put to test and refined in at least 20 aspiring energy communities in 6 European countries, the SHAREs Gateway will be broadly disseminated to relevant stakeholders all over Europe.

CoME EASY - Syncronising European Energy Award (EEA) to CoM and other EU initiatives about energy and climate policies to accompany more and more tuned municipalities in their 2030 performance. To facilitate municipalities in adopting energy and climate EU targets, CoME EASY will provide an open platform with supporting tools and materials for innovative and sustainable planning. The strategic objective of the project is to empower public authorities in planning, implementing and monitoring sustainable energy and climate policies by • optimising geographical and technical synergies and complementarity between the EEA and other methodologies (CoM/adapt, Compact, EIP on SCC, SCIS, E3P, the new CEN/CENELEC/ETSI Sector Forum on SSCC, the ISO standards and other EU projects …) facilitating multiple commitment, stakeholders’ and citizens’ engagement in the decision-making process and benchmarking/monitoring for the EU targets achievement • capitalising partners’ previous experiences in EU and national pilot projects. During the project will be developed and tested for the final roll out with the active participation of “Ambassador” municipalities • new additional tools available on an open platform for a quantitative monitoring, benchmarking and knowledge sharing (emission inventories evaluation & monitoring including long term CO2 and energy reduction paths/scenarios, best practices library, KPIs dashboard compliant with the main EU systems, guidelines & training materials for advisors and municipal staff ) • the harmonized version of the EEA quality management system adapted in terms of process and outputs • a successful methodology for the collaboration with civil society by an integrative stakeholder approach for sustainable policies promotion and interactive definition • an enhanced cooperation among regional/national eea municipalities to harmonise the neighboring plans exploiting common efforts and to align local policies with regional/national strategies.

All over Europe, a good level of knowledge about Sustainable Energy Action Plan (SEAP) development has been reached. There are different good quality methodologies and guidelines available. However, currently municipalities struggle to implement these action plans. There are different reasons for that; one of the most important is the fact that often municipal employees do not feel engaged and are not motivated to take any sort of actions and initiatives, unless someone has actually “obliged” them. In many cases, this lack of engagement and commitment ends up with investments in energy efficiency that do not deliver expected technical and economic outcomes. Hence, the energy efficiency potential is not fully exploited and worse suboptimal investments do not provide expected yields. Moreover, local authorities (LAs) more often are facing also challenges regarding climate resilient infrastructure and climate adaptation. The level of knowledge and understanding is even scarcer as regarding climate mitigation. COMPETE4SECAP is designed to deliver a systematic approach to energy savings in local authorities using energy management systems (EnMS) according to ISO 50001 or European Energy Award with dedicated online monitoring tool and energy saving competitions. EnMS and competitions when combined can trigger significant benefits by providing innovative and efficient way to involve municipalities that have already their SEAPs but do not act in order to foster their integrated development at local level. Trained and engaged municipal employees will be able to better implement energy efficiency projects, which then require higher investments. An EnMS will help the LA to have reliable data for informed decision and further help in monitoring and evaluation of implemented projects. The use of renewable energy and integration of climate adaptation will also be facilitated through EnMS with the set of procedures from an environmental management system (e.g. IS0 140001).

Climate change is a global problem and to solve it, we need to start on local level. To effectively implement energy and climate policies, concerted and strong action is needed. Municipalities often have ambitious goals and political will, but lack the harmonized, interdepartmental and long-term structures to successfully implement their climate and energy strategies and thus reach their goal. This is the starting point for the project, which focuses on capacity building in municipalities. By introducing the quality management and certification programme European Energy Award (eea) in Belgium, Croatia, Greece and Poland, the project aims at setting up the necessary structures in municipalities. During the project, 30 pilot municipalities will further develop and implement their climate and energy strategy by using the eea standards and criteria catalogue. External advisors will guide and monitor the continuous progress. Its certification will ensure that municipalities implement their climate and energy plans to high quality standards. The certification process is ongoing and ensures that municipal climate action progress. Their experiences and successes will pave the way for more municipalities in the target regions to join the eea. IMPLEMENT’s objective is to set up the necessary structures for a long-term roll-out of the eea in the partner countries. Partners will translate and adapt all eea tools to national context, receive adequate training to become skilled eea advisors, able to advice and guide pilot municipalities through the eea process. The consortium together with regional authorities will develop, based on experience exchange with eea expert regions, feasibility studies and business plans, tailor-made support schemes for the participating countries.