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.

FleFlex2Energy is a 48-month project with the ambitious goal to manufacture reliable Integrated Photovoltaics (IPVs) with differentiated product design, through the development of the first-of-each-kind Automated Roll-to-Roll (R2R) Manufacturing Line for Organic PVs. The F2E Manufacturing Line consists of the R2R Printing & Automated Assembly Machines, enhanced with robust metrologies for inline quality & process control under Artificial Intelligence (AI) analysis, implementing industry 4.0 concept. F2E IPVs will comply with all the standards, codes and product requirements of use in Buildings, Agriculture and Automotive sectors. The novel idea of Flex2Energy will be realized by 5 objectives: • Develop and upgrade manufacturing tools for design and aesthetics of OPV products, inline process quality control techniques and easily adaptable equipment design for printed PV technologies • Integrate tools, QC, equipment to Machines to build & demonstrate automated PL manufacturing of IPVs • Manufacturing high efficiency, durable printed IPV products at competitive cost • Demonstrate and Validate IPVs in energy efficient buildings, automotive and agriculture industries with minimum environmental and landscape impact • Deploy Market Strategy and Bridge the gap between PV and Building sectors F2E will implement innovative IPV products in three dedicated business cases to promote their early adoption and boost the new market demands. BIPV products will be installed on a public and a heavy industry building façade as energy efficient windows, while Agri-PVs will be installed on the roof of a Med GH working as a shade curtain system for growth of tomatoes and as energy generator making the GH energy autonomous. Finally, VIPVs will be installed on the roof of a commercial EV to increase mileage and also on the roof of a solar Carport to provide energy to electric vehicles. The IPV products will be evaluated in terms of performance, durability, social and industrial acceptance.

5G solutions for verticals is a well-defined European objective. This requires developing 5G infrastructures to address a wide range of applications adopting flexible architectures, offering converged services across heterogeneous technology domains with unified software control. However, vertical industries today can only verify use cases in small scales in commercial environments, before investing in large scale deployments. Through ICT-17 projects 5G infrastructures become available to verticals to test their applications, however large-scale trials are still not possible. 5G-VICTORI will conduct large scale trials for advanced vertical use case verification focusing on Transportation, Energy, Media and Factories of the Future and cross-vertical use cases. It leverages 5G network technologies developed in 5G-PPP Phase-1 and Phase-2 projects 5G-XHaul and 5G-PICTURE and exploits extensively existing facilities interconnecting main sites of all ICT-17 infrastructures i.e. 5G-VINNI, 5GENESIS and 5G-EVE and the 5G UK test-bed in a Pan-European Infrastructure. The project will provide enhancements of existing infrastructures towards integration of a large variety of vertical and cross-vertical use cases. 5G-VICTORI’s platform aims to transform current closed, purposely developed and dedicated infrastructures into open environments where resources and functions are exposed to ICT and vertical industries through common vertical and non-vertical specific repositories. These functions can be accessed shared on demand and deployed to compose very diverse set of services in a large variety of ecosystems. 5G-VICTORI’s uniquely strong consortium brings together major players form ICT including operators, equipment vendors academic and research organisation and SMEs as well as main players from vertical industries including nationwide rail and electricity operators, rail technology vendors, media content delivery players and a number of SMEs focusing on advanced vertical services.

In the face of climate change, events like COVID-19 crisis with high impact in specific sectors demonstrated the importance of resilient societies. As such, it is vital to act with a level of urgency for climate change related impacts to health sector that are proportionate to the scale of the threat, be prepared and informed on the basis of the best-available science, and practise clear and consistent communications to all those involved. Therefore, in MOUNTADAPT, various regional and local authorities and community members will take the leadership to co-design, co-develop and test eleven state of the art climate adaptation solutions across the mountains biogeographical region, in Austria, Slovenia, France and Romania. A diversity of actors of the health system will also collaborate throughout the project to demonstrate the replicability of the solutions in a diversity of settings: within the Alpine mountains in Romania, outside Europe in the Pyrenees in Andora and beyond, in the continental area in Germany. MOUNTADAPT will develop robust models to better understand the impact of climate change on health (PR1). The project will cover the whole chain of response to a climate induced health emergency with monitoring tools (PR2) that will be directly linked to short term forecasts to communicate warnings (PR3) to the relevant stakeholders. An emergency management tool (PR4) will finally support health systems to optimally organise staff in crisis time. This will be supported by guidance for transforming the health system (PR5) and empowered actors with the training courses for healthcare professionals and awareness raising campaigns for citizens (PR6). Detailed monitoring protocols and impact assessment frameworks (PR7) will allow for a continuous evaluation of a range of adaptation solutions during and after the project, providing incentive for their implementation. Finally, MOUNTADAPT will provide a full guide (PR8) for the implementation of its adaptation solutions, boosting their replication in new territories and will provide feedback to the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority.

SUITS takes a sociotechnical approach to capacity building in Local Authorities and transport stakeholder organisations with special emphasis on the transfer of learning to smaller sized cities, making them more effective and resilient to change in the judicious implementation of sustainable transport measures. Key outputs will be a validated capacity building program for transport departments, and resource light learning assets (modules, e-learning material, webinars and workshops), decision support tools to assist in procurement, innovative financing, engagement of new business partners and handling of open, real time and legacy data. SUITS argues that without capacity building and the transformation of transport departments into learning organisations, training materials will not provide the step change needed to provide innovative transport measures. Working with nine cities to model gaps in their understanding, motivation, communication and work practices, will provide each city with a map of its own strengths and weaknesses with respect to sustainable transport planning. From this, strategies to enhance capacity, based on each authority’s needs will be developed and organisations provided with the necessary techniques to increase their own capacity, mentored directly by research partners. Local champions will be trained to continue capacity building after the project. Using the CIVITAS framework for impact evaluation, the effectiveness and impact of SUITS in enabling reductions in transport problems such as congestion and pollution while improving cities capacity to grow as well as the quality of life for urban dwellers and commuters through the development of inclusive, integrated transport measures will be measured in the cities and at individual, organisational and institutional levels. All project outcomes will be disseminated in a stakeholder engagement program at local, national and EU wide levels, thereby increasing the likelihood of successful transport measures.