Energy poverty is a condition in which households cannot afford to be kept adequately warm at reasonable cost, given the income. It is becoming one of the key policy topics throughout the EU, but the region most affected by energy poverty is the area of South-East Europe - new member states as well as accession states. The energy costs are expected to further increase in the future, due to the fossil fuels depletion and taxation of greenhouses gases emissions directly contributing to climate change. A change in energy consumption habits is required across all social groups but is the most pressing in groups affected by energy poverty or endangered by it. Therefore the project Innovative Direction in Energy Advising (abbreviation: IDEA) purpose was to develop innovations in education about energy poverty. In the course of the project implementation, the most important objective achieved was to improve existing and develop new innovative educational methods and materials for adult training on energy poverty. For this reason, within this project, curriculum for training was developed, enabling the trainees to act as energy advisors to the energy poor thereby increasing their housing quality, improving indoor environment and decreasing energy bills. The innovative educational tools developed, allow for high quality learning outcomes. The number of stakeholders providing training on energy poverty will be increased by their use. An international network of organizations and individuals involved in energy poverty education was created and will be sustained. The partnership consisted of experienced organizations strategically placed in the most affected region - in Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia and Cyprus. The partner organizations acted as information hubs in their own respective states and also to the neighboring states where energy poverty also presents a heavy burden. Within the project duration, the partner organizations' skills was increased by participating in intellectual outputs development and in the joint staff training event which supported them in further dissemination, through multiplier and dissemination public events and by using the ICT dissemination tools (web pages, social networks, webinars), thereby sharing the gained knowledge and acquired skills with organizations and individuals active in the area of energy poverty. Much more than the 5000 expected individuals (at project application stage) were reached by the project activities. The following intellectual outputs were delivered: overview of already existing materials and training needs assessment; educational program and best practice exchange through mobility; energy poverty educational tools; and educational dissemination tools. For each of the intellectual outputs one of the partners was the leading organization, with other partners contributing to the content. Only after one intellectual output had been delivered, activities on the next output would commence. To ensure a high quality of the delivered outputs, a quality assurance plan was devised in the beginning of the project implementation, followed by 4 six-monthly quality reports. Four transnational meetings were organised with virtual on-line meetings in between physical meetings. The results achieved by the project implementation are: - Report covering all partner countries on the state of the art of existing methods and practices in terms of education about energy poverty and the training needs in this subject, accompanied by a database of stakeholders - Educational programme with a curriculum for adult education about energy poverty - Set of innovative educational materials and ICT tools - Guide to accompany the curriculum and to help interested stakeholders to implement it, complemented by video tutorials for each tool and an overview webinar in each country - Website to allow access to all the educational materials and guidance - On-line platform (facebook group) to allow exchanges and sharing of practices between stakeholders active or interested in the adult education on energy poverty The listed results are expected to contribute to the following long term benefits: - Reinforce adult skills and competencies in the field of energy poverty and energy advising - Solving the issue of energy poverty and simultaneously addressing the issue of climate change - Raising awareness of European citizens on the rising issue of energy poverty - Help the unemployed to identify energy advising as an opportunity for them to find job opportunities

Trondheim, Limerick, Alba Iulia, Pisek, Sestao, Smolyan and Voru and their industry and research partners are joining forces to co-create the future we want to live in. As aspiring Lighthouse and Follower Cities, respectively, they have detailed out their ambitions into the +CityxChange proposal, which describes a structured approach on how to develop and deploy Positive Energy Blocks and Districts and scale these out as part of the Clean Energy Transition. The approach combines: Prototyping the Future through Integrated Planning and Design; Enabling the Future through Creation of a Common Energy Market; and Accelerating the Future through CommunityxChange with all stakeholders of the city. New forms of integrated spatial, social, political, economic, regulatory, legal, and technological innovations will deliver citizen observatories, innovation playgrounds, regulatory sandboxes, and Bold City Visions to engage civil society, local authorities, industry, and RTOs to scale up from PEBs to PEBs to Positive Energy Cities, supported by a distributed and modular energy system architecture that goes beyond nZEB. On top of this, the consortium will create a new energy market design coupled to consumer-driven innovation, developed in close working cooperation with national regulators, DSOs/CSOs, property developers, and local energy communities. Flexibility will be put at the core of the distributed energy system by creating new micro-grid operation, prosumer-driven Community System Operators, and new markets for peak shaving/RES trading to reduce grid investment needs and curtailment. Their aim is to realize Europe-wide deployment of Positive Energy Districts by 2050 and prepare the way for fully Positive Energy Cities.

The QualDeEPC project is aiming to both improve quality and cross-EU convergence of Ener-gy Performance Certificate (EPC) schemes, and the link between EPCs and deep renovation: High-quality Energy Performance Assessment and Certification in Europe Accelerating Deep Energy Renovation (QualDeEPC). The objective of the project is to improve the practical implementation of the assessment, is-suance, design, and use of EPCs as well as their renovation recommendations, in the partici-pating countries and beyond. Recommendations for renovation shall be made coherent with deep energy renovation towards a nearly-zero energy building stock by 2050. In order to reach these objectives, the project will organise its activities in four stages: 1 | Analysis of existing EPC schemes, good practice, shortcomings, and priorities for improvement 2 | Development and testing of concrete proposals and tools for enhanced EPC assessment, certifi-cation, and verification, as well as Deep Renovation Network Platforms 3 | Adaptation to country needs and implementation of consensus elements, and developing a roadmap for further dialogue and 4 | Sustainability Strategy and Conclusive policy recommendations, dialogue, and transfer. Project partners will work to achieve consensus and implementation during the project for as many improvements as possible, seeking the cooperation of certification bodies, energy agen-cies and other organisations. Some of these are project partners, many others agreed to sup-port the project as associated partners. However, many of the potential improvements to EPC assessment, certification, and independent monitoring and verification will need adaptation of standards, regulations, or even legislation. The QualDeEPC project will stimulate such changes by (1) intensive dialogue involving the important stakeholders at all levels from the very beginning in the above four project stages and (2) disseminating its findings among the relevant target audiences in Europe.

This project will explore the potential of walking and cycling tracking services to promote walking and cycling mobility. We will focus on established walking and cycling promotion measures and thoroughly assess the potential of ICT based tracking services to overcome barriers to implementation and finding new factors driving the effectiveness of those measures. Through specific research, the related ICT challenges like scheme dynamics, privacy, trust, low-cost, interoperability and flexibility will be tackled for each type of measure. The measures to target will be established measures to promote walking and cycling travel to workplace, shopping, school and leisure promotion measures. We will investigate both the ability that tracking tools may have to address traditional challenges of these measures and their potential to bring new features in the fields of awareness raising, financial/tax incentives, infrastructure planning and service concepts. A common, flexible and open access tool will be developed to provide an ICT input and output platform that addresses the related ICT challenges. Over this platform it will be easy for anyone to build products based on tracking services tailored to the requirements of the specific measures. This project will develop and test a representative set of such products in real measures underway. These test cases will at the same time validate and provide additional inputs for the project’s research issues and trigger the widespread of tracking services to support walking and cycling measures in Europe. Users, policy makers and walking and cycling practitioners and final users will be deeply involved in all stages of the project.

The overall aim of ENERGee Watch is to enable peer to peer learning for regional and local authorities in order to precisely define, monitor and verify their sustainable energy and climate actions. Its main target are associations and networks of cities and regions and the learning process will be focused on how different sustainable energy and climate mitigation projects have been monitored and evaluated. Primarily, we will build on existing platforms and needs assessment surveys to perform a needs assessment and gaps identification with public bodies for learning and match these needs with available best practices. Then, public authorities and their associations and agencies will be selected and matched with one of the seven mentors who are all partners of ENERGee Watch. The learning program will be divided into four modules that include: i) data collection, ii) monitoring and verification, iii) indicators for adaption to climate change, iv) data display, dissemination and validation by final users (local authorities). ENERGee Watch will launch 4 modules per year (one per each topic, twelve in total) with a total of 72 participating mentees, which are all associations or networks which can distribute the knowledge further to their members. The added value of ENERGee Watch is that the learning program is not limited to a capacity building process but instead enables networking and examples from practice shown on the field. In the first step of each cycle - the masterclass - each participant can choose the learning objectives they want to accomplish in order that their progress can be tracked, and thus transparent standards will be set. The learning program will ideally result in improved policies and MRV standards, as well as partnerships for innovative sustainable energy policies and MRV practices.