This workshop shed light on the importance of engaging people and unlocking the potential of technologies to promote Energy Communities and meet the EU’s ambition of a joint net-zero emission of greenhouse gases by the year 2050. To ensure a people-centric, sustainable, just and innovative energy future, citizens, and experts must be brought into dialogue to co-design new ways of organising around energy.
To approach these challenges, four Horizon 2020 sister projects (Creators, LocalRES, Hestia, and Lightness) illustrated approaches, strategies, and solutions being tested in different typologies of Energy Communities. Instead of a techno-centric approach, these projects presented their methods to engage people and co-design technologies to forward a clean and fair energy transition. The Creators project showed how stakeholder needs in industrial sites are met using technologies; LocalRES drove reflections about the role of local representatives and citizens in co-designing technologies and Energy Communities; Hestia delivered conclusions about how engagement and gender inclusion, paired with energy and digital literacy, can boost the effectiveness of demand response technologies; and the Lightness project illustrated how an environmental justice framework is being implemented to co-create Energy Communities through technological and social innovation. A high-level dialogue was drawn by the experiences of these real cases, and it aimed to contribute to the decentralisation, decarbonization and democratisation of energy.
Participating projects: Creators, LocalRES, Hestia, and Lightness.
Session Chair: Tatiana Loureiro, R2M Solution
