The European Construction sector faces unprecedented challenges to achieve ambitious energy efficiency objectives, that can be met only if successful training initiatives and supporting policy instruments are put in place, acting as a springboard to stimulate the demand for energy efficiency skills. The INSTRUCT project aims to act at a market level by providing an operational framework and set of services serving a new generation of skilled and certified workers and fitters and paving the way to legislative changes that overall will stimulate the demand for energy skills across lifecycle and supply chains. Key outputs include: (a) quantitative and qualitative evidences that corroborate and reinforce the correlation between (i) skills and education and (ii) energy performance and quality; (b) a set of tools and instruments facilitating the mutual recognition of energy skills and qualifications in the construction sector; (c) real-world demonstrations (in 5 geographical European areas) of the usefulness and ease of use of the deployed instruments for recognition of energy skills and qualifications; (d) dissemination and awareness raising actions in consortium members countries, scaled up to the wider Europe; (e) new legislative frameworks enabling reliance on skilled workers in public / private procurement. The Consortium draws on (a) the engagement of internationally leading industry best practice and vocational training, (b) the educational excellence of leading institutions in Europe, (c) the robust experience of accrediting bodies in the construction domain. It provides a Europe-wide coverage with 7 participating countries, scaled up to 5 clusters, representing a multi-expertise ensemble of stakeholders and energy value chains deploying the INSTRUCT methodology and supporting tools in country-based pilots. It is supported by a network of stakeholders, involving the Build Up Skills chapters across Europe, and a Europe wide community of interest of 200+ members.

OptEEmAL aims to develop an Optimised Energy Efficient Design Platform for refurbishment at district level, which will deliver an optimised, integrated and systemic design based on an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) approach for building and district retrofitting projects, reducing time delivery and uncertainties, resulting in improved solutions when compared to business-as-usual practices. This main objective will be deployed through the following key objectives: 1. Development of a holistic and effective services platform for District Energy Efficient Retrofitting Design integrating interoperable modules and tools able to provide services for diagnosis, scenarios generation (according to stakeholders priorities), energy/ cost/ environment/ social evaluation, scenarios optimisation and data export. 2. Reinforcement of the presence of all involved stakeholders through an Integrated Project Delivery approach that will allow them being articulated through a collaborative and value-based process to deliver high-quality outcomes. 3. Development of an integrated ontology-based District Data Model that will contain key information in the fields of energy, comfort, environment (LCA), economic, social wellbeing and urban morphology. 4. Development of an Energy Conservation Measures catalogue (ECM) including technical, operational, maintenance and cost information giving valuable and consistent outputs to the design and district operation and maintenance stages. 5. Development of a bio-inspired optimization module based on Evolutionary computing with the aim to automate the decision making process to obtain the optimal design for an energy efficient retrofitting plan at district level. 6. Development of external connections of the OptEEmAL Platform to external entities (i.e. existing tools enabling the calculation of indicators to generate and optimise the retrofitting scenarios) 7. Strong disseminations, training, exploitation and market deployment strategies.

As an active key actor in the spatial planning and social innovation arena for Renewable Energy Landscapes REL, the PEARLS project will reinforce the population’s commitment to secure, clean and efficient energy. REL are regarded as spaces where renewable energies change the population’s relationship with energy and their landscape perception. Despite all efforts, resistance to REL lingers in Europe/the U.S., while the reasons for strong social acceptance in Mediterranean and South American countries is still unknown. Thus PEARLS will focus on Southern Europe and Israel due to their wealth of renewable energy resources and citizens’ deep engagement with REL. PEARLS will radically transform scientific knowledge on how to best implement REL across Europe and extend southern landscapes towards other Mediterranean countries through participant networks. PEARLS will generate a step change in the way that REL are theorised, detected and addressed and provide crucial support for the Pan-European Energy Challenge by establishing international, intersectoral and multidisciplinary collaboration as the nexus of a five-country holistic pool of universities and research centres in close cooperation with non-academic sectors. All Partnership members, from five universities and nine non-academic beneficiaries (companies, private consultancies, cooperatives and business associations) have proven expertise and experience in working with renewable energy, energy policy, REL, spatial planning and social innovation, through the internationalisation of applied research and training for capacity development. Via secondments, staff exchange and collaborative inquiry, the project will investigate how to enforce renewable energy best practice to contribute to the Energy Challenge. Deliverables will be provided by working reports, websites, video channels, toolkits, training and methodology materials, seminars, and scientific papers, academic journals and books.

To meet the global and European challenges of reducing the GHG emissions from the construction sector, Build-in-Wood will develop a sustainable and innovative wood value chain for the construction of multi-storey wood buildings. The potential estimated impact from Build-in-Wood is a reduction of GHG emissions of 12.1 MT/year by 2030. Build-in-Wood will, based on experiences from the stakeholders involved in construction of some of the worlds largest wooden multi-storey buildings, take building with wood beyond state of the art. The consortium has identified a strong need for improving the whole value chain and intent to make wood a competitive building material by delivering a fully documented, demonstrated, sustainable and cost effective building system. Build-in-Wood will address this challenge by innovative development of materials and components as well as structural systems and façade elements for multi-storey wood buildings fit for both new construction and retrofitting. Developments will be delivered by means of a dynamic co-created web-based building configurator – the Design Guide – and a complimentary web-based toolbox of documented materials and components. Build-in-Wood will demonstrate full-scale digital case projects for real projects and test system prototypes in operational environments. Active engagement of cities and their building ecosystems through technical and thematic co-creation workshops will strengthen the urban-rural connections. All developed materials, components and system prototypes will be tested, piloted and fully documented for immediate market uptake. Based on developments, recommendations for new or updated European harmonised technical specifications and Eurocodes will be provided. To meet consumer acceptance, regulatory and sustainability requirements, Build-in-Wood includes life-cycle, socio-economic and safety assessments that will guide policy and decision-making at industry and EU level.

STARDUST serves as smart connector bringing together advanced European cities and citizens of Pamplona (ES), Tampere (FI) and Trento (IT) - with the associated follower cities of Derry (UK), Kozani (GR) and Litomerice (CZ). These six cities, collaborating with relevant industrial partners, including a variety of innovative local SME, and supported by academia and research centres will demonstrate three lighthouse cities, deploy intelligent integration measures, test and validate technical solutions and innovative business models, and deliver blueprints for replication throughout Europe and abroad. The objective of STARDUST project is to pave the way towards the transformation of the carbon supplied cities into Smart, high efficient, intelligent and citizen oriented cities, developing urban technical green solutions and innovative business models, integrating the domains of buildings, mobility and efficient energy through ICT, testing and validating these solutions, enabling their fast roll out in the market . The core idea of the STARDUST project is the demonstration of different “innovation islands” as urban incubators of technological, social, regulatory and market solutions which, once validated, could contribute to this objective of transformation of our cities towards Smart Cities. The integrated approach of STARDUST is based in the combination of technological solutions with human being reflected in joint decision making, economic constraints, citizen’s governance, etc. The STARDUST Smart City concept has been designed to enhance the integration of all these aspects to define a new Urban Metabolism.