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