For years, concentrated solar power (CSP) has been considered an emerging technology that could disrupt the energy production sector. The possibility to store the electricity generated during the sunny operating hours in the form of heat enhances energy dispatchability and gives CSP a unique value proposition that conventional renewable energies cannot provide cost-efficiently since it requires the integration of costly large-scale battery systems. CSP is a cleaner technology compared to photovoltaics, but photovoltaics currently has lower overall capital costs, making it more attractive to investors and stakeholders who want to spend less money upfront. This is one of the main reasons why CSP has never really led either the electricity market or the heating one, even if its combined generation capability (heat and electricity) is globally recognized as a great advantage for a renewable technology. In this study, we analyze the reasons why CSP is not as widespread as it could be; at the same time, we look at the opportunities and the enablers for a further deployment of this technology, focusing on the European region.

Three Horizon 2020 projects, EEnvest, Triple-A and QUEST, are exploring innovative approaches to de-risking energy efficiency investments, focusing on how to render those investments attractive to the financial sector. EEnvest aims to develop a platform in order to contribute to the risk reduction for building energy efficiency investments, Triple-A focuses on enhancing at an early stage the investment value chain of energy efficiency projects and, finally, QUEST wants to improve the quality of management investments in energy efficiency.

This is a summary of the clustering workshop at the Sustainable Places 2022 conference. The H2020 funded projects LIGHTNESS, HESTIA, LocalRES and CREATORS came together to 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.

Workshop organized by INDIGO project as a collaborative activity among EU funded projects in the area of District Heating and Cooling. The objective of the workshop was twofold: (1) to create a cluster of European funded projects working in the area of District Energy Systems; and (2) to create a networking opportunity in which to share experiences on the results and difficulties of the researches, and to identify synergies.

DRIvE (Demand Response Integration Technologies) is a research and innovation project funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Program, whose main objective is unlocking the demand response potential in the distribution grid. DRIvE presented how the use of digital twins de-risks the implementation of demand response applications at the “Flexibility 2.0: Demand response and self-consumption based on the prosumer of Europe’s low carbon future” workshop within the conference “Sustainable Places 2020”. This workshop was organized to cluster and foster knowledge transfer between several EU projects, each developing innovative solutions within the field of demand response, energy flexibility, and optimized synergies between actors of the built environment and the power grid.

Heating and cooling consume half of the EU’s energy and much of it is wasted. The lion’s share of heating and cooling is still generated from fossil fuels, mainly natural gas, while only 18% is generated from renewable energy. In order to fulfil the EU’s climate and energy goals, the heating and cooling sector must therefore sharply reduce its energy consumption and cut its use of fossil fuels. To this end the European Commission adopted a heating and cooling strategy in February 2016 as part of the wider Energy Union Package. A number of activities and projects funded by the programmes of European Union are supporting this new EU heating and cooling strategy.