Citizen Energy Communities

This workshop intends to shed light on the importance of engaging people and unlocking the potential of technologies to promote Energy Communities and meet the EU’s ambition of a joint net-zero emission of greenhouse gases by the year 2050. To ensure a people-centric, sustainable, just and innovative energy future, citizens, and experts must be brought into dialogue to co-design new ways of organising around energy.
To approach these challenges, four Horizon 2020 sister projects (Creators, LocalRES, Hestia, and Lightness) will illustrate approaches, strategies, and solutions being tested in different typologies of Energy Communities. Instead of a techno-centric approach, these projects will present their methods to engage people and co-design technologies to forward a clean and fair energy transition. The Creators project will show how stakeholder needs in industrial sites are met using technologies; LocalRES will drive reflections about the role of local representatives and citizens in co-designing technologies and Energy Communities; Hestia can drive conclusions about how engagement and gender inclusion, paired with energy and digital literacy, cancan boost the effectiveness of demand response technologies; and the Lightness project will illustrate how an environmental justice framework is being implemented to co-create Energy Communities through technological and social innovation. A high-level dialogue will be drawn by the experiences of these real cases, and to contribute to the decentralisation, decarbonization and democratisation of energy.
Participating projects: Creators, LocalRES, Hestia, and Lightness.
Session Chair: Tatiana Loureiro, R2M Solution