Although Italy has a great potential for biogas production, many non-technical barriers are still present in the current framework. Some of the limiting factors involve public acceptance of the biogas facilities diffusion, as well as lack of a reliable coordination between different stakeholders. Furthermore, normative and legislative inadequacies and deficiencies haven’t facilitated the implementation of these technologies within the national context. The main project objective consists on the construction of a communicative model oriented to spread balanced information, based on environmental and economic benefits, between all the actors potentially involved in biogas/biomethane implementation. At the same time, actions will be focused on reducing the fragmentation between farmers, foresters and other stakeholders in order to reach the minimal facility dimension needed, increased biogas and biomethane penetration and reduce cost management. A participatory process model will be developed as the main project’s approach to reduce social conflict and to include all actors in important common decision making process; starting from the experience, a normative proposal on the participatory process will be recommended. The effectiveness of the proposal will be maximized applying the actions on specific and restricted areas: the study of the energetic unhatched potential deriving from anaerobic digestion of residual biomass or organic waste will constitute the starting point for communication and information campaigns toward the territory and its stakeholders. The attention will be focused on some high energetic potential regions where the diffusion of these technologies struggles to be realized and the effects of project actions on awareness and acceptance will be evaluated. In particular, a specific decisional participative model will be implemented and applied in one of the selected districts, as case study, involving in an active way all the stakeholders.

SKILLBILL’s overall objective is to develop a large and strong foundation for the growth and acceleration of renewable energy’s deployment, thanks to engaging with stakeholders of the whole chain, diffusing scientific culture and skilling multi-level workers. The basic idea underling the project is that the knowledge should be diffused at several different levels and qualitatively appropriate both to train the adequate number of workers and to increase RES awareness and to reach a more social and inclusive Europe The project aims at creating several pathways to induce target groups to get interested or involved in RES besides their initial level of education and their working position: the technological RES potential can be reached by increasing hard and soft skills of potential users and stakeholders, developing interest in the topic and having clear and appropriate approaches, such as tools and learning modules using suitable language. It’s important, beside the creation of instruments for the upskilling and reskilling of workers, technician and designers, to have awareness modules for unspecific public in order to fight against ignorance, fake news, gender gap and the phenomenon of functional illiteracy: it is widely documented that lifelong suitable learning process is the fundamental driver to support the development, maintenance and update of skills. SKILLBILL proposes concrete actions to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy at different levels: 1. Stakeholder community engagement 2. Knowledge sharing and peer learning 3. Skilling, upskilling, reskilling SKILLBILL will i) analyse and involve all the interested parts in open discussion using adequate language; ii) create several different pathways to increase skills after having mapped knowledge gap and without gender prejudice; iii) develop and implement innovative learning method; vi) evaluate the work performed.

Europe could double the biogas and biomethane production by 2030 by utilising the massive amounts of animal waste available. However, despite the technological maturity and commercial availability of relevant technologies, this promising potential is still largely untapped. In this context, ALFA supports at least 50 livestock farmers in 6 EU counties (IT, DK, DE, BE, SK, EL, ES) to overcome existing barriers and viably take up biogas systems. We start by establishing regional Hubs that analyse the local framework conditions and livestock value chains, and help engage local stakeholders in co-designing our approach. Then, we enhance selected livestock farmers’ business and technical capacity by providing them with a series of demand-driven financial, business, and technical support services and organising dedicated capacity-building seminars. In parallel, we develop an Engagement Platform hosting tools that facilitate collaboration and knowledge exchange among industry actors and provide credible estimations of each farm’s biogas potential, prospect profits, environmental and social impacts. Also, we improve the societal acceptance of biogas facilities amongst citizens by 25% (or above) through well-tailored awareness-raising campaigns. At the same time, we trigger the development of an enabling environment for the market uptake of biogas by formulating relevant policy recommendations and widely disseminating them to more than 60 policymakers. Finally, a monitoring and evaluation framework evaluates the performance and impact of all the above, providing us with the intel required to catalyse mutual learning across regions and contribute to creating a guide for replicating our results. Therefore, we expect a power output of 30 MWel by our supported cases / projects, leading to an increased share of renewable energy in the final energy consumption in the target countries and ultimately, saving 270,000tn CO2 and 330,000tn CO2-eq from manure management per year.