Positive clean Energy District’s (PED) are a key building block in the future energy paradigm for carbon-neutral cities and communities. With the rise of modern technology, local digital twins – the digital representations of a functional territory combining low- and high-velocity data with dynamic models – play a significant role in PED development and the scaling of it, supporting decision makers and planners in taking informed decisions towards a sustainable future. However, focusing narrowly on energy and mobility topics confined to the traditional sectors, digital twins for PEDs currently lack representation of significant aspects such as social, economic, and environmental properties, and hence, draw only part of the picture of a district or a city. Limited by data availability and lacking awareness of existing data, this shortcoming in digital twin modelling for PEDs leads to suboptimal decisions, impacting negatively ambitious efforts of sustainable development in cities and communities. This becomes even more clear when reflecting on the scalability issues across the 80.000 municipalities in the EU27: As highly complex entities, cities and communities differ in their physical, social, economic and even cultural structures, making it challenging to replicate PEDs in a trivial way across Europe. The BIPED project demonstrates how to overcome these barriers in a simple yet highly efficient manner that works everywhere by answering three key questions to push PEDs to the next level: wide deployment. Three key questions needs to be addressed to push PEDs to the next level: • How can digital twins be extended to refine a district’s profile representation, guiding PED design and demonstrators? • How can the quantitative collection of soft data support the advancement in digital twin development? • How to boost the replication potential of PED solutions for climate neutral cities with reinforced decision-makings

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.

ELEXIA will develop/upgrade validated tools for planning and managing integrated energy systems in different conditions and will integrate and combine energy systems across vectors and sectors towards a cost-optimised as well as flexible and resilient energy system of systems. A Digital Services Platform will host the energy management and planning services and will foster flexibility and sector coupling. A System Planning Toolbox will be developed and deployed to support effective sector coupling at local sites considering different scenarios, operational details, possibly conflicting interests of multiple local actors, and security of supply. An Energy Management Systems will be built and deployed for flexible, cost-optimised, and resilient operation of sector coupled local sites including forecasting, digital twins, optimization, control, monitoring, assessing operating conditions, predicting anomalous operation, and preventing occurrence of breakdowns. ELEXIA will demonstrate the use of planning and operational tools in a one-stop-shop, modular and open, digital platform at TRL7–8. It will demonstrate the benefits of sector integration at local / national level in three different geographical, climate and economic conditions in Europe: in an industrial port environment in Portugal, in an urban-city hub environment in Denmark, and in an industrial-urban-residential environment in Norway. ELEXIA will assess environmental, economic and social sustainability, will deliver a methodology for CAPEX / OPEX and value creation, and will focus on policy and governance. It will put focus on stakeholder engagement and societal acceptance and will ensure effort towards future exploitation and replication. ELEXIA will establish and demonstrate realistic and concrete pathways to ultimately achieve independence of fossil fuels by harnessing the latent flexibility of the energy system through integration, data-intelligence, and planning, working towards the 2050 European goals.

SEEDS unites a multidisciplinary and complementary team of SMEs, LEs, RTOs, and stakeholders that constitute the whole (local) value chain of energy efficiency in buildings and thermal demand electrification, from planning, design, and construction to operation and commissioning. SEEDS is built upon the consortium's vast experience in developing, testing, and valorizing decarbonization solutions, supervising real-life demonstrations of building renovation and smartification, and deploying energy flexibility. SEEDS demonstrate replicable heat pump solutions integrated with renewable energy to decarbonize buildings' thermal demand. Addressing that every building is unique and requires tailored solutions to be cost-efficient and energy efficient, we develop scalable and generic design and operational optimization methodologies, deploy multiple proven heat pump technologies at scale, and optimally integrate them into the building and broader energy system. SEEDS demonstrates these (up to TRL6-8) in 6 pilot sites (incl. 1 replication site), providing real-world settings spread across the different climate zones and European construction markets. SEEDS is centered around three key themes: cost efficiency through optimization, system integration through holistic design and control, and replicability through configuration modularity and scalable building types. These are addressed in 7 focus areas: 1) Iterative design of the component and integrated system, 2) Secure and interoperable data platforms and IoT, 3) Integrated system optimization for energy efficiency and flexibility, 4) Deploying energy flexibility to enhance grid stability, 5) Replication strategies, exploitation, and business models, 6) Decision making support framework for replication, and 7) Dissemination, communication, and stakeholder outreach. Thanks to the 27 partners' wide-reached field of impact and networks, SEEDS is set out to boost the electrification of thermal demand in buildings.

The vision of the ARV project is to contribute to speedy wide scale implementation of Climate Positive Circular Communities (CPCC) where people can thrive and prosper for generations to come. The overall aim is to demonstrate and validate attractive, resilient, and affordable solutions for CPCC that will significantly speed up the deep energy renovations and the deployment of energy and climate measures in the construction and energy industries. To achieve this, the ARV project will employ a novel concept relying on a combination of 3 conceptual pillars, 6 demonstration projects, and 9 thematic focus areas. The 3 conceptual pillars are integration, circularity and simplicity. Integration in ARV means the coupling of people, buildings, and energy systems, through multi-stakeholder co-creation and use of innovative digital tools. Circularity in ARV means a systematic way of addressing circular economy through automated use of LCA, digital logbooks and material banks. Simplicity in ARV means to make the solutions easy to understand and use for all stakeholders, from manufacturers to end-users. The 6 demos are urban regeneration projects in 6 locations around Europe. They have been carefully selected to represent the different European climates and contexts, and due to their high ambitions in environmental, social and economic sustainability. Renovation of social housing and public buildings are specifically focused. Together, they will demonstrate more than 50 innovations in more than 150,00 m2 of buildings. The 9 thematic focus areas are 1) Effective planning and implementation of CPCCs, 2) Citizen engagement, environment and well-being, 3) Sustainable building re(design) 4) Resource efficient manufacturing and construction workflows, 5) Integrated renewables and storage, 6) Energy management and flexibility, 7) Monitoring and evaluation, 8) Business models, financial mechanisms, policy and exploitation, 9) Communication, dissemination, and stakeholder outreach.