The Social Sciences & Humanities for Climate, Energy aNd Transport Research Excellence (SSH CENTRE) project brings together 13 leading organisations from across the EU, including: 3 universities, 4 research institutions, 2 stakeholder network organisations, and 4 R&I and communications SMEs. Our partners bring world-leading expertise across SSH and STEM disciplines applied to climate, energy and mobility, covering neutrality, community-led initiatives, heating and cooling, circular economy and sufficiency, and digital technologies. Partners will reach 228,880+ stakeholders by leveraging their significant experience in transdisciplinarity and citizen engagement, and networks that span academia, policymakers at various levels, the private sector, civil society and citizens. Our objectives directly address the call challenge with an aim to support cross-sectoral collaborations and empowerment of citizens and networks towards the development of socially innovative solutions for the EU’s climate transition. Issues related to Open Science, inclusivity and diversity – especially with regards Southern and Eastern Europe and different career stages – are at the heart of the project. SSH CENTRE will meet its objectives through a set of 7 carefully-designed Work Packages. Key activities involve: development of novel SSH-STEM collaborations to facilitate the delivery of the EU Green Deal; SSH knowledge brokerage to support regions in transition; and the effective design of strategies for citizen engagement in EU R&I activities. Outputs include action-led agendas and building stakeholder synergies through regular Policy Insight events. The high-profile virtual SSH CENTRE, and its 660+ members, will thus represent a ‘go-to' gateway for Cluster 5 SSH research excellence, delivering inclusive governance and engagement approaches. The Centre will generate and share best practice for SSH policy advice, overcoming fragmentation to accelerate the EU’s journey to a sustainable future.

JustWind4All aims to support the acceleration of on- and offshore wind energy through just and effective governance, i.e., the creation of synergies among people and organisations to coordinate and participate in actions around wind energy strategies and deployment. To this end, JustWind4All develops knowledge, practical guidelines, instruments, strategies, and trainings for just and effective decision-making in on- and offshore wind energy governance. This move towards more effective and just decision-making processes and structures is crucial in the context of ambitious EU renewable energy targets, which require installing more and larger on- and offshore wind farms, speeding up the planning and deployment processes whilst ensuring no one is left behind. JustWind4All makes use of a rigorous trans- and interdisciplinary multi-method research design. It combines holistic impact assessment based on a social-ecological approach with techno-economic modelling to assess a variety of social, environmental, technical, and economic impacts and/or benefits to improve decision-making. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies (e.g., case studies, multicriteria mapping) help to investigate ways to foster wind energy citizenship with a particular focus on participation, energy justice and social innovation. Through transdisciplinary knowledge co-production in Wind Labs, JustWind4All makes the most out of novel resources i.e., practices (repowering), technologies (airborne, floating) and regions (e.g., Bulgaria) and engages in knowledge co-production with wind energy governance actors for fit-for-purpose outcomes. A cutting-edge Wind Forum network enables knowledge exchange and dialogue between multiple stakeholders across policy, community, market and third sector – it ensures that JustWind4All’s knowledge, practical guidelines, instruments, strategies, and training activities have maximum impact.

The European energy market is rapidly changing under the influence of three megatrends that currently drive the transformation of energy sectors worldwide: decarbonization, decentralization and digitalization. These megatrends have stimulated several technical and social innovations in the energy sector, which offer alternatives to the traditional business model of large centralized energy utilities and have the potential to further the goals of the Energy Union. One such example of social innovation in the energy sector are new forms of local energy communities that generate, store and use energy in a collaborative way and hence allow consumers to get involved in the production and storage of energy (“prosumage”) at the local level. New clean energy communities in a changing European energy system (NEWCOMERS) are often democratic and participatory in nature and at the same time characterized by unconventional alliances of actors, the use of innovative and smart technologies and new forms of value creation for their members and society. The NEWCOMERS project aims to investigate which regulatory, institutional and social conditions, at the national and local level, are favorable for the emergence and operation of new clean energy communities. Furthermore, NEWCOMERS will explore how these new clean energy communities meet their members’(i.e. citizens’ and consumers’) needs better than more traditional energy services business models and whether they have the potential to increase the affordability of energy, their members’ energy literacy and efficiency in the use of energy, as well as their members’ and society’s support for the clean energy transition. The ultimate goal of the NEWCOMERS project is to identify the types of clean energy communities that perform best along a variety of dimensions, such as resilience, citizen engagement, security, efficiency and affordability, while being based on sustainable business models that have the potential to be scaled-up.