Realising an accelerated expansion of renewable energy will require a switch from centralised to decentralised energy production and greater social participation, together known as energy democracy. The increase in energy democracy and social equity will be an essential part of the clean energy transition. A transition that could represent one of the most fundamental social, economic and technical changes in modern history. The most common businesses associated with social innovation in the renewable energy sector are Cooperatives, Aggregators and Crowdfunding platforms. These businesses facilitate consumers to take a more active role in the electricity system. Achieving sustained growth in energy democracy requires a better understanding of support structures for successful social innovation across technical, legal and economic systems. SocialRES aims to devise more effective ways of increasing social innovation leading to greater social acceptability as well as more durable governance arrangements and socioeconomic benefits. Through research excellence and co-creation of knowledge with relevant stakeholders, SocialRES will develop socially innovative and inclusive strategies for the energy system of the future. SocialRES will supplement the existing fragmented data on social innovations with new understandings from businesses, end-users and stakeholders to provide a comprehensive evidence base for policy design. The project will employ innovative techniques such as a Peer to Peer (P2P) crowd-investing for renewable energy sources (RES) projects, P2P lending and P2P virtual RES energy aggregator platform. The SocialRES team combines partners from a range of disciplines together with industry expertise to develop a comprehensive understanding of the strengths and limitations of the current renewable energy system to foster social innovation and to shape a roadmap for a future, more innovative and equitable system.

There is enough waste energy produced in the EU to heat the EU’s entire building stock; however despite of this huge potential, only a restricted number of small scale examples of urban waste heat recovery are present across the EU. The objective of REUSEHEAT is to demonstrate, at TRL8 first of their kind advanced, modular and replicable systems enabling the recovery and reuse of waste heat available at the urban level. REUSEHEAT explicitly builds on previous knowledge and EU funded projects (notably CELSIUS, Stratego and HRE4) and intends to overcome both technical and non technical barriers towards the unlocking of urban waste heat recovery investments across Europe. Four large scale demonstrators will be deployed, monitored and evaluated during the project, showing the technical feasibility and economic viability of waste heat recovery and reuse from data centres (Brunswick), sewage collectors (Nice), cooling system of a hospital (Madrid) and underground station (Berlin). The knowledge generated from the demonstrators and from other examples across the EU will be consolidated into a handbook which will provide future investors with new insight in terms of urban waste heat recovery potential across the EU. Innovative and efficient technologies and solutions, suitable business models and contractual arrangements, estimation of investment risk, bankability and impact of urban waste heat recovery investments, authorization procedures are examples of handbook content. The handbook will be promoted through a powerful dissemination and training strategy in order to encourage a rapid and widespread replication of the demonstrated solutions across the EU.