PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
Buildings consume more energy than any other sector in the EU. Municipalities with over 45000 inhabitants are now required by the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) Recast to develop heating and cooling (H&C) plans, but medium-sized administrations typically lack the technical and financial resources of larger municipalities. Regional energy agencies, embedded locally and connected supra-regionally, are the perfect enablers to support the clean energy transition in the over 1000 medium-sized EU municipalities. To accelerate the clean energy transition of the building sector, ESCALATE will (1) create a training programme, template, and guideline to develop H&C plans and (2) train six regional energy agencies to become effective H&C planners (in Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Slovenia). These will (3) develop 12 pilot H&C plans with nearby municipalities, receiving technical assistance from the ESCALATE team and providing feedback on the capacity-building offer. All capacity-building materials will be publicly available. The trained agencies will then (4) train other energy agencies in their countries and the ESCALATE team will (5) activate a wide network of stakeholders to disseminate results, raise awareness of the capacity-building offer and scale up adoption all over the EU. Two more countries (Austria and Germany) will be engaged in local-national policy dialogue and in assessing the role of energy communities and consumer-led initiatives. ESCALATE combines the technical expertise of five knowledge partners, the local understanding of eight regional energy agencies, and the dissemination and engagement skills of one communication partner, across ten EU countries, to mainstream best practices in H&C planning through a comprehensive capacity-building programme.