The transition to renewable energy, particularly through the widespread adoption of distributed solar PV systems, is hindered by significant technical, social, financial, and regulatory barriers. Key challenges include energy poverty and inequality, especially in Mediterranean regions where inefficient housing and rental systems exacerbate the issue. Limited awareness, bureaucratic hurdles, and inadequate financial incentives further slow adoption, while integrating decentralized renewable energy into existing communities remains complex. Unlocking the full potential of Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) requires clear benefits, accessible financial tools, and innovative technologies to enhance the efficiency and longevity of PV systems. SOCIAREM will accelerate the adoption and profitability of PV systems within RECs by overcoming these barriers through an innovative, implementable solution integrated with collective self-consumption schemes. The project will develop advanced tools tailored to diverse socio-economic and geographical contexts, enhancing efficiency, minimizing energy losses, and maximizing renewable energy use. Blockchain-enabled platforms will facilitate secure, decentralized peer-to-peer energy sharing, improving energy autonomy and resilience. Inclusive social data spaces will ensure fair energy distribution while safeguarding privacy, addressing energy vulnerability, and promoting social equity. Citizen engagement will be fostered through gamification and educational tools, ensuring participation across different cultural and behavioural profiles. A consortium of universities, R&D centres, and companies will drive SOCIAREM’s development, ensuring strong scientific and market expertise. The project’s solutions will be tested in four European RECs—Switzerland, Cyprus, Portugal, and Italy—while incorporating insights from Egypt. By reaching TRL7, SOCIAREM will validate its tools’ effectiveness, providing a scalable and sustainable model for RECs.

AI-EFFECT will establish a European Testing Experimentation Facility (TEF) for developing, testing, and validating AI applications in the energy sector. It will be distributed across nodes, virtually connecting existing European facilities. The solution includes a digital platform leveraging European building blocks for interoperability, flexibility, and scalability. AI-EFFECT aims to be a central hub for testing energy sector AI algorithms, fostering collaboration across utilities, industry, academia, and regulatory authorities. Resilience is ensured through a decentralized design, aligning with the EU Energy Data Spaces framework. The project involves developing 4 use cases/nodes addressing key energy challenges, focusing on district heating, transmission congestion management, DERs integration, and energy communities. The framework involves utilities proposing challenges, vendors developing algorithms, and researchers contributing solutions. Each use case has evaluation criteria, baselines, and benchmarks. AI certification procedures, including interpretability and verification, will be implemented, and the evaluation process will be automated. Benchmarks and certifications are publicly available, encouraging open-source contributions. The project breaks sector barriers, leveraging existing infrastructures and technologies for cross-sectoral collaboration. The platform enforces policies for data quality, integrity, and privacy, promoting controlled data sharing and collaboration. Secure APIs ensure controlled interactions, including risk and security assessments. The consortium explores certification, standardization, and quality requirements in line with the EU AI Act. Governance and business models for the enduring AI-EFFECT will be examined, considering the EU AI Act. The consortium aims to make AI-EFFECT a sustained business beyond initial funding, seeking input from members, other TEFs, and regulatory authorities for the preferred model.

ENPOWER will design, develop and demonstrate SSH-driven methodologies, interactive and closed-loop tools, and data-driven services for energy-activated citizens and energy-secure cross-sector communities towards a citizen-centric energy system. We combine leading-edge ICTs with social/behavioural dimensions and with sharing economy and value stacking business models to deploy: 1) a Social Science Framework for energy citizens activation and innovative multi-dimensional incentives for citizens’ participation in energy markets; 2) AI-based consumers clustering and segmentation algorithms; 3) interactive tools and facilitation services for energy community planning; 4) Energy Data Space adaptation to support community-level data-driven activation and interoperable automated privacy and sovereignty-preserving Demand Response (DR); 5) P2P DLT/Blockchain digital marketplace for tokenized energy and non-energy assets reciprocal compensation; 6) data-driven services and apps for energy efficiency and activation performance management; 7) ICT services and Digital Twins for community-level energy optimization and aggregated flexibility management to trade off local self-consumption against grid service provisioning, while boosting a beyond-energy community social welfare; 8) Edge monitoring hubs for automated DR; 9) Business Sandbox for novel sharing economy and social innovation-based business models; 10) methodologies for evaluating different energy community setups, upscaling and replication. ENPOWER framework will be validated along 4 Front Runners energy communities pilots and further replicated in 2 Early Adopters, covering different levels of maturity of communities, to demonstrate increased RES local self-consumption and consumers participation to the energy markets, while nurturing increased local security of supply. ENPOWER Leadership Programme and blueprints will support EU-wide replication and advice regulatory bodies on communities-friendly enabling frameworks.

HEDGE-IoT proposes a novel Digital Framework which aims to deploy IoT assets at different levels of the energy system (from behind-the-meter, up to the TSO level), to add intelligence to the edge and cloud layers through advanced AI/ML tools and to bridge the cloud/edge continuum introducing federated applications governed by advanced computational orchestration solutions. The HEDGE-IoT Framework will upgrade the RES-hosting capacity of the energy systems and will unleash a previously untapped flexibility potential. It will increase the resilience of the grid, create new market opportunities and promote advances in IoT standardization, by introducing and managing a plethora of diversified, interoperable energy services over scalable and highly distributed data platforms and infrastructure. The multi-dimensional framework of HEDGE-IoT comprises the following pillars: (a) the Technology Facilitator Pillar will exploit the computational sharing by offloading applications on the grid edge, towards providing a set AI/ML federated learning and swarm computing applications; (b) the Interoperability Pillar, which leverages on leading-edge interoperable architectures, such as the Data Space architectures; (c) the Standardisation Pillar will enable all involved platforms, systems, tools and actors to seamlessly communicate and exchange data in standardized formats using widely used standards, such as SAREF, etc.; (d) the Digital Energy Ecosystem Enabling Pillar will ensure the creation of an ecosystem facilitating the increased integration of RES and characterised by resilience. Liaisons with EU initiatives for IoT and digitalisation will be established (e.g., the AIOTI) and the engagement of stakeholders will be ensured by addressing IoT ethics and cultivating trust among end-users, thus promoting inclusivity. Scalability and replicability studies will be performed and connections with innovators and SMEs will be established through the Open Call mechanism of the project.