The cluster on Enabling Technologies in the framework of the Fast Track on Energy Communities workshop held in Rome during the Sustainable Places 2021 conference presented a series of H2020 projects and their innovative technological solutions to facilitate the uptake of energy communities, demand-response and energy efficiency projects in Europe.

This workshop brought together a selection of H2020 EU-funded projects involving experts from the biomass, geothermal, solar thermal, and heat pump sectors to discuss a common strategy for increasing the use of renewable energy technologies for heating and cooling for buildings and industry.

There are several small energy sources that can be exploited to provide useful energy: small temperature differences, mechanical vibrations, flow variations, latent exhausts are just some examples. The recovery of such common and small energy sources, usually wasted, for example with the conversion into useful amounts of electrical energy, is called energy harvesting. Energy harvesting allows low-power embedded devices to be powered from naturally-occurring or unwanted environmental energy (e.g. pressure or temperature difference). The main aim in the last years of researches in such field, was the increasing of the efficiency of such components, with a higher power output and a smaller size. At present, a wide range of systems incorporating energy harvesters are now available commercially, all of them specific to certain types of energy source. Energy harvesting from dissipation processes such as fluid lamination is a challenge for many different applications. In addition, control valves to dissipate overpressures are common usage of many plants and systems. This paper surveys the market opportunities of such harvesting systems, considering the trade-offs affecting their efficiency, their applicability, and ease of deployment. Particular attention will be devoted to small energy harvesters than can exploit small expansions, such as from lamination valves or to systems that can feed mini sensors from small pressure drops, promising compactness, efficiency and cost effectiveness.

In this workshop, we discussed the progress of five Horizon 2020 projects—HYCOOL, SHIP2FAIR, THERMOSS, SUNHORIZON and HYBUILD—all implementing solar thermal and renewable technologies for buildings and for the industrial sector. The discussion offered opportunities to identify and benchmark key challenges being faced by the projects, both technical and non-technical, and allowed to identify cooperation opportunities.

This workshop brought together a selection of H2020 EU-funded projects to offer an overview of different tools used for the optimization of local energy networks and demonstrate how to facilitate grid interaction from the perspective of technology leaders representing four H2020 projects. This session offered a unique opportunity to discuss different approaches and compare the frameworks, practices, and tools used by different energy communities.