The project aims to mobilize and guide public authorities in defining long-term energy policy priorities, promote multi-level governance and support regional and local authorities in developing, financing and implementing ambitious integrated sustainable energy and climate policy action plans in order to achieve climate resilience and carbon neutrality by 2050. This will be achieved through: - Facilitation of the vertical and horizontal multi-level governance cooperation in eleven (11) European countries. - Identification of strategic policy priorities at a national level, fostering multi-level governance to capitalise on synergies and economies of scale for implementing energy efficiency and renewable energy actions. - Capacity building at local/regional level. - Development of at least 116 sustainable energy and climate policy action plans for 2050 at the local and regional level. - Development of at least 105 funding proposals for implementing sustainable energy and climate actions/projects. - Targeted promotion of the concept of carbon neutrality to at least 50,000 relevant stakeholders across Europe. - Support EU policies and initiatives, such as the Global Covenant of Mayors on Energy and Climate. C-TRACK 50 is expected to contribute considerably towards achieving the 2030 and 2050 EU energy and climate targets. C-TRACK 50 relates to the topic EE–09–2017: Engaging and activating public authorities, as it will empower local and regional authorities to develop, finance and implement ambitious sustainable energy and climate resilient plans and actions. C-TRACK 50 addresses the following two actions that are part of the topic’s scope: - Supporting public authorities to foster local integrated energy, transport mobility and land-use planning. - Supporting public authorities to foster multi-level governance, linking up national and sub-national levels for delivering integrated sustainable energy planning and projects to achieve synergies and economies of scale

STOR-HY aims to minimize CAPEX, OPEX for innovative pumped storage projects. This is achieved by enhancing the lifetime and recyclability of components and equipment, and devising operation strategies for unconventional schemes through sensor-based condition monitoring systems. These systems detect early failure mechanisms, enabling the postponement of unnecessary maintenance actions and avoiding unplanned outages. Furthermore, strategic use of digital tools for operational management is employed to improve efficiency, reliability, and availability of Pumped Storage Plants. Considering energy and market demand dynamics, variable renewable generation, and integration, STOR-HY addresses climate change effects and enhances flexibility and resilience of the EU energy grid. The project focuses on optimizing plant availability, offering increased storage potential, peak shaving, fast response regulation, and ancillary services for grid resilience. The integration of digital tools, real-time controllers, monitoring strategies, and predictive maintenance algorithms is consolidated in a Cyber-physical platform for Advanced Decision Support (CADS). This platform, along with high-tech computational models, enables the realistic estimation of critical component degradation in short- and long-term operations. This information supports informed decision-making in PSP operation and aids in the design of innovative control strategies for challenging conditions. These developments result in a broader operating range and increased flexibility in EU hydropower generation and storage potential. STOR-HY prioritizes building regional connections with local stakeholders, industry, academia, and policy institutions. Sustainability considerations encompass environmental, circularity, economic, and social aspects, drawing insights from previous projects. These insights include on-site impacts, societal acceptance, ecological concerns, and LCC.

AI spreading in the energy sector is expected to dramatically reshape energy value chain in the next years, by improving business processes performance, while increasing environmental sustainability, strengthening social relationships and propagating high social value among citizens. However, uncertain business cases, fragmented regulations, standards immaturity and low-technical SMEs workforce skills barriers are actually hampering the full exploitation of AI along the energy value chain. I-NERGY will deliver: (i) Financing support through Open Calls to third parties SMEs for new energy use cases and technology building blocks validation, as well as for developing new AI-based energy services, while fully aligning to AI4EU service requirements and strengthening the SME competitiveness on AI for energy; (b) An open modular framework for supporting AI-on-Demand in the energy sector by capitalising on state-of-the-art AI, IoT, semantics, federated learning, analytics tools, which leverage on edge-level AI-based cross-sector multi-stakeholder sovereignty and regulatory preserving interoperable data handling. I-NERGY aims at evolving, scaling up and demonstrating innovative AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) Energy Analytics Applications and digital twins services that will be validated along 9 pilots, which: (a) Span over the full energy value chain, ranging from optimised management of grid and non-grid RES assets, improved efficiency and reliability of electricity networks operation, optimal risk assessment for energy efficiency investments planning, optimising local and virtual energy communities involvement in flexibility and green energy marketplaces; (b) Delivers other energy and non-energy services to realise synergies among energy commodities (district heating, buildings) and with non-energy sectors (i.e. e-mobility, personal safety/security, AAL), and with non- or low-technical domains end users (i.e. elderly people).

GINNGER will ease the regeneration of neighbourhoods and built environments through the implementation of co-creation processes in heterogeneous stakeholders’ structures. This will facilitate the planification and implementation of actions in local environments, leading to a reduction of social, environmental, technological and economic risks thus to deliver healthy, affordable and sustainable built environments in EU. The project will create positive social impact in neighbourhoods by stablishing and validating the GINNGER co-creation methodology aimed at supporting decision-making procedures for regeneration actions. The co-creation methodology will rely on SSH innovations for social progress and the enhancement of public policies. The project will put special emphasis on the validation of the co-creation methodology in 6 pilots: P1. Langreo (ES), P2. Plovdiv (BG), P3. Massagno in (CH), P4. Murcia (ES), P5. Orte (IT) and P6. Paris (FR). Within these pilots, the co-creation methodology will support the implementation of 21 Regeneration Actions. Moreover, GINNGER will set-up a local figure called the Green Neighbourhood Facilitator, which will ensure that voices across pilots are heard and will lead the capacity buildings actions at local level. To complement the implementation of the regeneration actions from a technical perspective, GINNGER will develop and validate a digital toolkit to support the planification, implementation and operation of the regeneration actions. The digital toolkit will be composed by a total of 13 digital solutions grouped into four blocks dealing with Energy, Renovation, Resources and Mobility. As a result, GINNGER will set long-term strategies for the planification and implementation of cooperative models for neighbourhood regeneration, facilitated by the generation of 14 key exploitable results during the project. The implementation of such an ambitious project requires of a consortium of 24 partners from 8 EC member states.

SO WHAT main objective is to develop and demonstrate at TRL8 an integrated software which will support industries and energy utilities in selecting, simulating and comparing alternative Waste Heat and Waste Cold (WH/C) exploitation technologies that could cost-effectively balance the local forecasted H&C demand also via RES integration. The SO WHAT integrated tool will be designed to support industries, and energy utilities in 1) auditing the industrial process to understand where WH/WC could be valorised 2) mapping the potential of locally available RES sources to be integrated with WH/WC potential 3) mapping the local forecasted demand for heating and cooling 4) define and simulate alternative cost-effective scenarios based on WH/WC technologies also leveraging TES introduction 5) evaluate the impacts (in terms of energetic, economic and environmental KPIs) that the adoption of the new scenarios will generate against the current situation (i.e., baseline) both at industrial and local level 6) promoting innovative contractual arrangements and financing models to guarantee economically viable solutions and less risky investments. To do so SO WHAT will capitalize already existing tool and knowledge from previous research experiences (REEMAIN, PLANHEAT, REUSEHEAT, CELSIUS…) and the expertise of 11 industrial validation sites from different REII/ non-REII sectors (petrochemical, chemical, metallurgic, food etc.) that will be involved in the project to validate the tool and provide relevant insights for its development. SOWHAT tool will be built indeed following a participatory approach involving both National clusters from Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Sweden, Romania (composed by local industries, public authorities/energy agencies, energy utilities/ESCOs) and external stakeholder since the very beginning of the development in order to have a wide, clear and structured promotion of WH/C also thanks to a robust training campaign and policy oriented dissemination actions.