In the EU, COVID-19 and associated policy responses led to economy-wide disruptions and shifts in services demand, with considerable energy-system implications. The European Commission's response paved the way towards enhancing climate ambition through the European Green Deal. Understanding the interactions among environmental, social, and economic dimensions in climate action post-COVID thus emerged as a key challenge. This study disaggregates the implications of climate ambition, speed of economic recovery from COVID-19, and behavioural changes due to pandemic-related measures and/or environmental concerns for EU transition dynamics, over the next decade. It soft-links two large-scale energy-economy models, EU-TIMES and NEMESIS, to shed light on opportunities and challenges related to delivering on the EU's 2030 climate targets. Results indicate that half the effort required to reach the updated 55% emissions reduction target should come from electricity decarbonisation, followed by transport. Alongside a post-COVID return to normal, the European Green Deal may lead to increased carbon prices and fossil-fuel rebounds, but these risks may be mitigated by certain behavioural changes, gains from which in transport energy use would outweigh associated consumption increases in the residential sector. Finally, the EU recovery mechanism could deliver about half the required investments needed to deliver on the 2030 ambition.

In district energy systems planning, the calculation of energy needs is a crucial step in making the investment profitable. Although several computational approaches exist for estimating the thermal energy need of individual buildings, this is challenging at the district level due to the amount of data needed, the diversity of building types, and the uncertainty of connections. The aim of this paper is to present a simplified measurement-based methodology for estimating the cooling energy needs at the district level, which can be employed in the preliminary sizing and design of a district cooling network. The methodology proposed is suitable for tertiary buildings and is based on building electricity bills as historical data to calculate the yearly cooling demand. Then, the developed method is applied to a real case study: the feasibility analysis of a sustainable district cooling network for a hotel district in the city of Marrakech. The designed system foresees a 23-MW_cold district cooling network that is 4 km long, supplying 26 GWh of cooling to the tourist area. The results show that the proposed methodology for cooling demand estimation is coherent with the other existing methods in the literature.