The overall purpose of the SUSTENANCE project is to set up sustainable energy systems for achieving novel carbon neutral energy communities. The project focus on the development of smart technological concepts ensuring a green transition of the energy systems with higher share of local renewable energy and more efficient integrated energy solutions for the electrical, heat, water, waste as well as transportation infrastructure. The set up solutions will at the same time have good socio-economic impact in the local communities and ensure ecofriendly solutions and good infrastructures, which provides support to sustaining the essentials of life. The demonstration activities are set up in four countries: Denmark, India, Netherlands and Poland. These countries has different local energy resources, socio-economic, user behavior, political structures, market conditions and regulations. The project will show how same technical concepts such as coupling of different energy vectors, storage solutions, demand response, intelligent control schemes and digitalization can be applied to all demonstration cases despite the huge differences in the local conditions and regulations. Road maps will be set up based on these technical solutions together with guidelines for methods for user engagement and ensuring cooperation among the users in relevant cases leading to cooperatives. Finally, business cases will be set up for the different demonstration sites seen from both user perspective, small enterprises and utility point of view taking into account the local conditions. In this way, synergy effects with inputs from the different demonstration sites are expected and the results give abundant possibilities for maximum impact and replication in other local communities in the four countries as well as in societies worldwide.