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.

A carbon-neutral European Union by 2050 is an ambitious target that presents technical and societal challenges. While technical research is advancing rapidly to reach a net-zero target, the overall skillsets of the working force are lagging behind in understanding, employing and mastering sustainable technologies for the business models. Therefore, the RES4City project envisions a codesigned educational framework for upskilling the workforce to integrate, influence and combine the current sustainability best practices for renewable energies and fuel technologies. The main pathways to reach this objective are the definition of microprogrammes, the development of serious games for learning and training, the establishment of the industry-academy programme and the analysis of industry-based case studies for the fast track towards sustainability and circular economy. In addition, the program will focus on developing and testing the program in coordination with different stakeholders such as public governance, industry, NGOs, and citizens. Within the program, a separate task on inclusivity and gender balance will promote and ensure the participation of a representative cohort of students. The thematic area selected for the project is the cities. The link between these sectors is intrinsically defined, and they have extensive unexploited opportunities for renewable energy deployment and fossil fuel substitution to improve their sustainability and the massive potential of circularity implementation.

NOBEL GRID will develop, deploy and evaluate advanced tools and ICT services for energy DSOs cooperatives and medium-size retailers, enabling active consumers involvement –i.e. new demand response schemas – and flexibility of the market – i.e. new business models for aggregators and ESCOs. Through the dual-use of telecommunication networks, and validating the integration of renewable generation presence and demand response systems, NOBEL GRID will offer advanced services to all actors in the retail markets of the electricity system in order to ensure that all consumers will benefit from cheaper prices, more secure and stable grids and low carbon electricity supply. The project results will be demonstrated and validated in real world environments with active involvement of all the actors, and based on the new business models defined during the project.

ONE-BLUE will provide an integrated assessment of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) and their impacts, will develop new monitoring tools, and will provide an advanced understanding of the combined effects of CECs and climate change (CC) on the different marine ecosystems and their biodiversity. The following objectives are defined: • Improve the current knowledge of the concentrations, profiles, fate, behaviour, and effects of CECs, in the different marine compartments and ecosystems through three case studies (Atlantic and Arctic oceans and the Mediterranean Sea) and develop safety guidelines and protocols for future CECs monitoring in marine ecosystems. • Provide an advanced understanding of possible interaction between CC and CECs in marine ecosystems with studies under controlled conditions in marine mesocosms. • Develop a database (DB), the CECsMarineDB, following FAIR principles, with a database management system (DBMS) to collect the data generated in ONE-BLUE and capitalize data from other projects and existing DBs. A graphical user interface (GUI) will be developed and used for data exploration and demonstration of the fate and behaviour of CECs in a changing environment. • Provide new solutions in support of the implementation of relevant EU policies; (i) a series of new approach methodologies (NAMs) to improve the ecotoxicity assessment of CECs in marine ecosystems; (ii) a tiered effect-directed approaches (EDA) combining toxicological assessment and chemical analysis; (iii) an advanced ultrasonic system for sampling and enrichment micro/nanoplastics from seawater; (iv) a remote autonomous sensor to assess CECs in marine waters in quasi-real-time; a decision support system (DSS) based on machine and deep learning strategies to assess and forecast combined effects of CC and CECs in marine ecosystems. • Disseminate the project results and establish the exploitation plan for the developed technologies.