The overarching aim of SMART-UP is to encourage the active use of Smart Meters and In-House Displays by vulnerable customers, in those Member States where the roll-out of Smart Meters has been embarked upon. Indeed, previous studies have shown that Smart Meters do not lead to energy savings in the residential sector unless households actively use them and are encouraged to modify their everyday practices. Our project intends to fill in this gap, while also raising awareness on demand response services. The way we intend to do so is by developing a training program for installers, social workers and other frontline staff in contact with vulnerable people, so that they can inform vulnerable consumers about the benefits brought about by smart metering and advise them on how to use their Smart Meter and In Home Display (IHD) units (where fitted) to best effect, each time they are in contact with them. Indeed, most vulnerable and low-income householders require a one-to-one and on-going support. The training packages will be tested and improved before getting disseminated towards the major actors involved in smart meters deployment (DSOs, energy utilities, installers…). From 50 to 100 installers or other frontline staff will be trained in each project partner’s country. Each of them will deliver face-to-face advise to 10 to 20 households, so as to reach 1,000 households in each country. DSO and energy utilities (depending on the national context) will be involved to provide the necessary support for this experiment and to ensure further dissemination of the training packages. Besides empowering vulnerable consumers, the project will serve to get some feedback on their specific needs and on the ways to appropriately communicate with them and help them take profit of smart metering. The project will also help consolidate data on how much energy can be saved if vulnerable householders are empowered to make best use of the opportunities that Smart Metering offers.

Considering that energy management has become a high important issue in future Europe and that there’s a huge lack of trained people to meet the energy management needs, it’s a must to develop a clear, transparent, transnational and crossbording e-training. As SMEs represent more than 9O% of the enterprises and more than 70% of the employment in the participating countries, it’s good to meet these enterprises in their needs for qualified energy managers. The project EEMS4SME or European Energy Management Specialists for SMEs will therefore develop an open training and innovative digital platform all over Europe. A lifelong learning digital environment will be established in the field of energy management to answer the huge lack of global training and vision for energy management, which can thus create employment all over Europe. This innovative e-learning platform is ideal to support individuals in acquiring and developing key competences to aim employability and personal development in a fast changing technical and environmental world. The training will support the development of national and cross-country sectoral skills strategies and will support permeability between different training pathways all over Europe. It will tackle all discrimination in gender, age and race as individuals can learn whenever they want, which is ideal to combine work and training. An international digital training with similar understanding will cross the borders of different regions, cultures and legislations.The transparency and comparability of energy management qualifications and learning outcomes will support labour mobility and facilitate transitions between training and the world of work in energy management all over Europe and will thus create employment chances for women, disabled, unemployed graduates in the energy management field, which is an investigation in Europe’s future.In the strategic partnership a good balance is reached between reliable expertise in education and training in energy efficient technologies for students and for adults with the university Thomas More Kempen – Knowledge Centre for Energy (Belgium), the balikesir sustainable development association (Turkey) and the Association Ecoserveis (Spain) on the one hand and partners with good knowledge of the needs of SMEs as the Chamber of Installation Specialists in Bulgaria (CISB), and the Chamber of Commerce of Padua (Italy). All partners have experience in developing training programs and in qualification and re-qualification of technicians and experts. Furthermore the partnership represents different climate conditions spread all over EU and partners have links with EU wide networks to disseminate the projects results. The exchange of best practices and the merge of different insights and experiences from partners all over Europe will guarantee a good common training program for energy management to meet the needs of many SMEs in Europe.In the course of this project, training activities will be carried out, respectively : Train the trainer, Energy Management Specialist training program and e-learning modules. The train the trainer course is transnational, will take place in Turkey during 5 days and is meant for 2 trainers of each participating country. It will be given by highly certified experts in energy management. The target is double : the different national training modules will be reviewed in order to decide how they will be processed in one global online platform and the trainers will be able to disseminate the training in energy management in their country in the second phase as a test for the online course. This second training is meant for SME staff to become energy management specialists. By an e-learning trajectory and a contact seminar the participants will be able to share their experiences, so that all the experiences can be discussed in a transnational project meeting to optimise the e-learning modules. In this respect, Energy Management System Training of SMEs personnel should be considered as a key target. For the process of dissemination, e-learning modules will be developed and will help the program to reach a wider audience. In the third phase at least 500 people will be trained during the project time with the global e-learning module for energy management specialists.The expected results will be realized is 2 dimensions : national and transnational.A national energy management structure will be available to implement in the facilities. (ISO 50001) and a certified expertise will establish sustainable energy management in the SMEs. A transnational digital platform for adults all over Europe who wish to specialize in energy management and energy efficiency, will be available. An inventarisation of exchanges of best practices in all units of the organisations will reduce energy consumption and production costs and will help to reduce emissions. This project will offer an effective way to mitigate global warming.

Eurostat data reveals that the 11% of the total population of the European Union is unable to keep their home adequately warm. Caused by low household income, high energy bills, and low dwelling energy efficiency, energy poverty has traditionally been associated with the inability of households to meet their heating needs during winter. However, up to the 19% of households declared not being comfortably cool in summer. Nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005, with the last five years comprising the five hottest. Not to mention this 2019 June has been the hottest on record. Climate change is increasing both the severity and frequency of extreme hot weather and heat waves and in dense urban areas, these heatwave episodes will be combined with the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, worsening city centres temperatures which will negatively impact human health and wellbeing. Thus, cooling needs and overheating risk need to be incorporated into the energy poverty equation. The project COOLtoRISE aims to reduce summer energy poverty incidence among European households improving their indoor thermal habitability conditions and reducing their energy needs during the hot season, which will decrease their exposure to heat and heat-related health risks. Not all households have an air conditioning system and it is known that energy poor households make a restrictive use of heating and cooling as they cannot afford associated energy bills. However, raising awareness on summer energy poverty and implementing actions to mitigate it will have a double benefit on European households. First, heat exposure of energy poor households will be reduced by increasing indoor thermal conditions, which will decrease in their risk to suffer heat related diseases. Second, raising summer energy culture and preventing air conditioning devices to be installed can have serious benefits on climate change preventing future emissions.

Numerous attempts of implementing transition pathways across Europe illustrate the difficulty of designing policies that combine efficient climate action and justice considerations. One reason is that the socially diverse, and thus also geographically dispersed demands and vulnerabilities of potentially affected groups do not appear as a well-structured input at any stage of the policy-making process. Therefore, TANDEM will test an innovative transdisciplinary approach in five different case studies in Spain, Belgium, Finland, Poland and Austria that address controversial transition policies in energy and mobility affecting urban and rural populations. The TANDEM project aims to design a methodology allowing policy makers to create and implement inclusive and just transition pathways by involving potentially affected citizens, public authorities, the private sector and other relevant stakeholders. It relies on combination of accessible and complementary methods: deliberative visioning build on art-based approaches, system mapping, assessment and appraisal methods. These methods constitute the backbone of a series of three deliberation panels with citizens. In these panels TANDEM invites participants to create their visions, perspectives and narratives on just transition policies and to define their own criteria and interventions. This deliberation process will guide a systemic impact assessment that will inform individual appraisals of the interventions. Public authorities will be involved at the beginning and end of each panel to provide insights on political, social and economic factors that should be taken into consideration. Furthermore, private companies will be invited to participate through interviews and surveys. TANDEM will thus develop a transdisciplinary approach to identify and analyse emerging inequalities of low-carbon transition policies, as well as to co-design socially fair and effective alternative transition pathways with stakeholders.

V2Market is an innovative service to incorporate the Electric Vehicles’ (EV) batteries into the electricity system as storage and flexibility capacity, using Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) and Vehicle-to-Building (V2B) technology combined with energy efficiency (EE) and price forecasting ICT tools. V2Market puts together all the relevant actors in the value chain to work on the definition of the role and the contractual arrangements of a new business case, the aggregator, and its different possibilities with the other key stakeholders: the EV owners, and the flexibility buyers (DSO, TSO, BRP). V2Market will tackle energy efficiency at different levels: - Efficiency at the system level, by providing flexibility services to the grid. - Efficiency at the building/end user level, by optimising energy management thanks to the incorporation of the EV battery, which will also facilitate an optimisation of the energy produced by local RES. - Efficiency resulting from the substitution of older fossil-fuel based vehicles for electric vehicles. - It will make the EV battery an independent asset (as a major cost item that needs to be managed separately). This will result in measurable energy savings and performance improvements for the overall energy system. To respond to these EE needs, V2Market will develop a comprehensive business case for aggregators based on two types of service: A – Provision of ancillary services to the grid (frequency regulation, spinning reserves, peak shifting). B – Integration of flexibility services with EE at buildings’ level. V2Market will help the aggregator to develop its business model, and use big data to tailor its services to the patterns of its pool of EV owners. This is intended to consolidate a more predictable pool of EV batteries, which can be useful to develop also contractual arrangements with the flexibility buyers and provide stability to all the transactions within the value chain.