Clean Energy Transition Planning & Energy Vulnerability

Workshop Overview:

This workshop will cluster six European projects funded within the framework of the LIFE CET Programme that are developing tools, methods and capacity building programs for Clean Energy Transition planning and Energy Vulnerability mitigation. Participants to this workshop can expect to learn about the objectives of each project with focus on the specific tools and capacity building opportunities available for municipalities, local regional authorities and the professionals / organizations that support them in the development of planning and implementation of sustainability measures on the territory.  After project introductions, a roundtable format will be utilized to extract lessons learned, common challenges and identified best practices.  The roundtable seeks to be interactive with all workshop participants.

Target Audience:

Local Regional Authorities, Municipalities and their planners, Energy Agencies, Universities partnering with municipalities for initiatives on the territory, consulting companies and sustainability professionals partnering or offering services to territory and municipal planners for clean energy transition planning and energy vulnerability.

Workshop Chair:

Thomas Messervey, R2M Solution

Contributing projects:

• • ENTRACK
  • LOCAL GoGREEN
  • NECPLATFORM
  • RENOVERTY
  • energypoverty0
  • Step-WISE

Agenda:

 About the projects:

ENTRACK, LOCAL GoGREEN, NECPlatform, RENOVERTY and Step-WISE and EPOV0 are European research projects aimed at addressing climate change, energy efficiency, and sustainable development in Europe. Each project tackles specific challenges through tailored strategies, focusing on different regions and stakeholder groups. These efforts enhance integrated climate and energy planning, support vulnerable communities, and strengthen multi-level governance, contributing significantly to Europe’s energy transition and climate goals.

LOCAL GoGREEN employs a bottom-up approach to build capacity in local authorities of pilot municipalities in Slovenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Italy, and Spain for integrated climate and energy planning (ICEP). By sharing guidance and best practices, it enhances synergies among public and private stakeholders in implementing local measures. The project targets five areas: sustainable transportation and e-mobility, energy-efficient buildings, renewable energy expansion, land use for carbon absorption, and waste-to-energy.

RENOVERTY seeks to foster energy efficiency building upgrades in the energy poor households of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) / South-eastern Europe (SEE) and Southern European countries (SE) by establishing the methodological and practical framework to build renovation roadmaps for vulnerable rural districts in a financially viable and socially just manner. Specifically, the project aims to deliver tools and resources to support local and regional actors to build and execute single or multi-household roadmaps for rural areas. Strategically, the project will contribute to minimise logistical, financial, administrative, and legal burdens caused by a complex and multi-stakeholder home renovation process.

ENTRACK aims to support local authorities in rural areas to co-design social energy policy responding to specific and real needs of citizens, especially those vulnerable, in eight pilot rural municipalities in the Mediterranean (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain) . ENTRACK will provide local policy actors at a regional and municipal policy level with scientific-technical knowledge, capacity and a validated methodological approach to efficiently design social energy policies with the active participation of all actors through co-designing process. This will enable local authorities not only to learn how to design and implement policies, but, while doing so, to include the citizens in their agendas and energy strategies, as well gaining inputs from the latter. 

Step-WISE increases the capacity of Local and Regional Authorities to initiate an effective energy transition through development of Clean Energy Transition Plans using digital tools built around the Intelligent Communities Lifecyle (ICL) suite of interconnected decision support tools offered by IES. Pilot countries include Bulgaria, Spain, Cyprus and European Islands. The project actively seeks the engagement of Replicators (energy agencies and practitioners that want to learn the digital tools to offer services) and Adopters (municipalities and other LRAs that would like to receive support in the development of clean energy transition plans or potential upskill and directly utilize digital tools directly).

NECPlatform is a LIFE-funded project supporting six Member States (Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Italy, Portugal and Romania) in complying with implementing Climate and Energy Dialogue platforms (Article 11 of the Governance Regulation (1999/2018)), where parties from all relevant governance levels can meet and contribute to the co-creation of the national energy and climate policies so to shape together their NECP. These dialogues present an opportunity for Member States, currently in the process of updating their National Energy and Climate Plans, to reinforce multi-level governance in drafting these plans, as requested by the European Commission. By the end of this 30-month project in March 2025, six Climate and Energy Dialogues will have taken place in each of the six countries, with the objective of making the platforms permanent, e.g. by transferring their ownership to National Authorities or another relevant partner for their continuation after the end of the project. A replication programme with other Member States will also take place, while material documenting the process will shortly be available. 

Energy Poverty Zero (EPOV0)’s main objective is to support progress toward scale up of deep energy retrofit in vulnerable districts to fight energy poverty by combining existing efforts on energy poor people support, one-stop-shops, deep-energy retrofit industrialisation and district-based dynamics. EP-0 develops “industrialized retrofit potential” assessment tools for cities to better assess their potential scaling and replicability district per district, to deploy district energy retrofit compass with inhabitants, transcribing for citizens what different action would imply in terms of cost-benefit and comfort, and to assess relevance of collective buy-in scheme for citizens and housing organizations