THERMOS (Thermal Energy Resource Modelling and Optimisation System) will develop the methods, data, and tools to enable public authorities and other stakeholders to undertake more sophisticated thermal energy system planning far more rapidly and cheaply than they can today. This will amplify and accelerate the development of new low carbon heating and cooling systems across Europe, and enable faster upgrade, refurbishment and expansion of existing systems. The project will realise these benefits at the strategic planning level (quantification of technical potential, identification of new opportunities) and at the project level (optimisation of management and extension of existing and new systems). These outcomes will be achieved through: a) Development of address-level heating and cooling energy supply and demand maps, initially for the four Pilot Cities, and subsequently for the four Replication partners - establishing a standard method and schema for high resolution European energy mapping, incorporating a wide range of additional spatial data needed for modelling and planning of thermal energy systems, and their interactions with electrical and transport energy systems; b) Design and implementation of fast algorithms for modelling and optimising thermal systems, incorporating real-world cost, benefit and performance data, and operating both in wide area search, and local system optimisation contexts; c) Development of a free, open-source software application integrating the spatial datasets with the search and system optimisation algorithms (trialled and tested through the public authorities representing four Pilot Cities); d) Supporting implementation of the energy system mapping methodology, and subsequently the use of the THERMOS software, with a further four Replication Cities/Regions, from three more EU Member States; e) Comprehensive dissemination of mapping outputs and free software tools, targeting public authorities and wider stakeholders across Europe.

AURORA aims at an innovative long-term citizen engagement with energy sustainable behaviours empowering civil society to adopt a leading role in the energy cycle and to be real actors of a sustainable change via the promotion of citizen science practices. AURORA Energy Awareness rationale will be implemented as a demonstrator in 5 European countries. AURORA rationale is based on the upgrade of social communities -4 university communities and 1 rural deprived area- to new civic consortia -established as local energy communities- to act as Citizen Science hubs. There, on the one hand, citizens will crowdfund a local solar photovoltaic facility in an inclusive system enabling low-cost shares from 20EUR, and on the other hand, participants will monitor their individual energy mix demand behaviours, which together with their energy production in the facility, will generate accurate know-how on the carbon footprint related to their energy mix behaviour, which will be managed through the AURORA app. AURORA proposes a novel labelling system to help citizens to better understand their energy-related impacts. Later on, interventions to modify their energy behaviour towards a more climate-neutral impact while fostering energy-savings will imply the involvement of citizens in individual and collective actions, covering from civic innovation workshops to home-made low-cost sensors or community infrastructures fabrication, to environmental observation for creating civic local roadmaps. The final objective is to generate the first generations of Near Zero-Emission Citizens acting as ambassadors for sustainable energy behaviours. As a consequence of the activities performed by citizens, data collected AURORA will also be able to improve energy transition scenarios including citizens' behaviours and learning periods and generate reliable data on the impact of climate on energy infrastructures.

Heating and cooling (H&C) accounts for about half of Europe’s total energy needs with 75% still dependent on fossil fuels. Thus, rapid and significant change is needed to reach the EU 2050 goals. Due to the local nature of H&C systems, action has to be taken at local level involving a variety of stakeholders. This has been recognised in recent years and activities have been started like developing best practice policies and open source analysis tools. However, (efficient) H&C planning and project development are still not commonplace in most European municipalities. The objectives of Act!onHeat are to further disseminate and take up the concept and methods for strategic H&C planning, increase its quality and to push the development and implementation of identified measures. To reach these goals Act!onHeat will implement the following activities: (i) identify the success factors of strong and efficient existing H&C plans and develop a workflow for strategic H&C planning and project development based on the existing open source tools Hotmaps and THERMOS, (ii) support at least 120 municipalities in strategic H&C planning and the development of at least 30 pre-feasibility studies for related individual projects with a mix of tailored individual and group support activities, (iii) train stakeholders who can actively contribute to decarbonisation in the use of workflows, processes and tools through a dedicated training programme, and (iv) leverage additional impact with a mix of Europe-wide roadshow events, acceleration dialogues, webinars and further promotional activities. The consortium is perfectly suited for these activities bringing together leading European experts in strategic H&C planning and policy analysis, local governments networking, capacity building and investment support. A remarkable number of letters of support show the interest of the target group as well as the well-established connections between the target group and the consortium members.