Trondheim, Limerick, Alba Iulia, Pisek, Sestao, Smolyan and Voru and their industry and research partners are joining forces to co-create the future we want to live in. As aspiring Lighthouse and Follower Cities, respectively, they have detailed out their ambitions into the +CityxChange proposal, which describes a structured approach on how to develop and deploy Positive Energy Blocks and Districts and scale these out as part of the Clean Energy Transition. The approach combines: Prototyping the Future through Integrated Planning and Design; Enabling the Future through Creation of a Common Energy Market; and Accelerating the Future through CommunityxChange with all stakeholders of the city. New forms of integrated spatial, social, political, economic, regulatory, legal, and technological innovations will deliver citizen observatories, innovation playgrounds, regulatory sandboxes, and Bold City Visions to engage civil society, local authorities, industry, and RTOs to scale up from PEBs to PEBs to Positive Energy Cities, supported by a distributed and modular energy system architecture that goes beyond nZEB. On top of this, the consortium will create a new energy market design coupled to consumer-driven innovation, developed in close working cooperation with national regulators, DSOs/CSOs, property developers, and local energy communities. Flexibility will be put at the core of the distributed energy system by creating new micro-grid operation, prosumer-driven Community System Operators, and new markets for peak shaving/RES trading to reduce grid investment needs and curtailment. Their aim is to realize Europe-wide deployment of Positive Energy Districts by 2050 and prepare the way for fully Positive Energy Cities.

The 2018 EPBD update identifies deep renovation as key to drastically reduce energy demand and achieve the EU vision of a decarbonised building stock by 2050. The technology to achieve this reduction is available on the market today. Renovation rates are still far from the target 3% and shallow retrofits persist with low impacts on energy consumption. StepUP will develop a new process for deep renovation for decarbonisation, with fast design to operation feedback loops to minimise performance gap and optimise investments. The project will deliver plug&play technologies for minimal disruption, interconnected for maximum impact on energy, costs, IEQ and user comfort. The new iterative approach to renovation, based in big data for continuous performance improvement, will reduce financial barriers and make decarbonisation of existing buildings a reliable, attractive investment. StepUP will: 1. Make renovation more attractive and reliable with a new methodology based on near-real time data intelligence to identify cost-optimal, high impact interventions at any stage of the building life; 2. Reduce the performance gap to 10% via an integrated life-cycle software platform to plan renovation steps, identify high value ECM, improve IEQ, integrate RES (including storage) and optimise operations by constantly refining and verifying targets and constraints; 3. Minimise time on site to 40% by advancing innovative technologies for deep renovation to a market-ready renovation package of Plug & Play Technologies, including RE generation and storage for decarbonisation; 4. Optimise renovation investments via innovative financing models for optimisation of energy, comfort and cost performance over the building life, based on progressive financing and building performance as a service; 5. Accelerate the renovation market via an open protocol for interoperability of the StepUP solutions with third party market products, fostering a plug&play environment accessible to innovative SMEs.

In an increasingly urbanising world, governments and international corporations strive to increase productivity of cities, recognized as economy growth hubs, as well as ensuring better quality of life and living conditions to citizens. Although significant effort is performed by international organisations, researchers, etc. to transform the challenges of Cities into opportunities, the visions of our urban future are trending towards bleak. Social services and health facilities are significantly affected in negative ways owed to the increase in urban populations (70% by 2050). Air pollution and urban exacerbation of heat islands is exacerbating. Nature will struggle to compensate in the future City, as rural land is predicted to shrink by 30% affecting liveability. VARCITIES puts the citizen and the “human community” in the eye of the future cities’ vision. Future cities should evolve to be human centred cities. The vision of VARCITIES is to implement real, visionary ideas and add value by establishing sustainable models for increasing H&WB of citizens (children, young people, middle age, elderly) that are exposed to diverse climatic conditions and challenges around Europe (e.g. from harsh winters in Skelleftea-SE to hot summers in Chania-GR, from deprived areas in Novo mesto-SI to increased pollution in Malta) through shared public spaces that make cities liveable and welcoming.

Heat Pump and solar appliances are the most social accepted residential Renewable Energy based energy systems. SunHorizon will demonstrate up to TRL 7 innovative and reliable Heat Pump solutions (thermal compression, adsorption, reversible) that acting properly coupled and managed with advanced solar panels (PV, Hybrid, thermal) can provide heating and cooling to residential and tertiary building with lower emissions, energy bills and fossil fuel dependency. A Cloud based functional monitoring platform will be realised in the project to be the “performance data mine” for the development of Data Driven/KPI oriented optimized algorithms and tools to predict maintenance, optimize the management towards maximisation of solar exploitation and give to the manufacturer inputs for new installation design, via an innovative “robust design under uncertainty approach” which aims to overcome classical H&C equipment oversizing due to safety factors . This monitoring platform will also drive smart end user interfaces that will be applied at building level to collect thermal comfort data towards a new end-user driven H&C control system. SunHorizon tools will be applicable not only to proposed solar coupled HPs, but to all H&C appliances towards a global increasing efficiency of EU H&C stock and its decarbonisation. 5 low emission H&C Technology packages (TPs) will be tested coupling HP and solar installation. SunHorizon aims to be a breakthrough demonstration to market project involving 21 partners and 8 demosites all around EU focusing its activities on “reducing system costs and improving performance as well as optimising existing technologies for H&C applications”. SunHorizon will be focused on three main research pillars interacting each other towards project objectives achievement, demonstration and replication: i) OPTIMIZED DESIGN, ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING OF SUNHORIZON TECHNOLOGIES ii) SMART FUNCTIONAL MONITORING FOR H&C,iii) KPI DRIVEN MANAGEMENT AND DEMONSTRATION.

If BIM is key to address the construction sector growing technical complexity, to overcome construction processes fragmentation and communication problems between stakeholders, to reduce on-site time and improve quality and affordability, its uptake for the renovation of the EU existing building stock is yet to come and already late. To face this BIM4REN starts from 3 workflows adapted to the construction sector segmentation (90% of companies are SMEs) presenting particular technical and organisational requirements and has adapted the project and consortium to provide adequate and innovative processes, methodologies, software and hardware tools & BIM developments for each one of them, backboned by state of the art BIM technologies like worldwide used BIM Server (open-source) and BIM Bots by TNO among many others. BIM4REN gathers together top European RTOs active in the Built Environment domain (Nobatek, CSTB, Tecnalia, TNO, Fraunhofer ISE) alongside key industrial actors (EDF, CMB Carpi & ATI Project (leading BIM implementers in the EU market) with 2 Universities (RWTH & Vilnius Gedimas) and up to 11 SMEs: R&D performing (R2M, Ekodenge), SME contractors (Kursaal) and technology providers (IES, EnerBIM, WiseBIM, VRM, AEC3, etc.) with the European Builders Confederation, the Green Building Council Italy and a large French Social Housing Organisation (Logirep) representing the whole residential renovation value chain. B4R digital ecosystem will be accessible via a web based One Stop Access Platform, where depending on each user profile and needs, orientation, best practice examples from a dedicated database and links to the different tools and services (from Top-grade to Entry-level) will be provided on differentiated access schemes underpinned by different business models. Inspired by the Open Innovation 2.0 paradigm the project will setup a demonstration campaign with “pilots as Living Labs” integrating all stakeholders in 3 cities (Paris, San Sebastian and Venice).