Trondheim, Limerick, Alba Iulia, Pisek, Sestao, Smolyan and Voru and their industry and research partners are joining forces to co-create the future we want to live in. As aspiring Lighthouse and Follower Cities, respectively, they have detailed out their ambitions into the +CityxChange proposal, which describes a structured approach on how to develop and deploy Positive Energy Blocks and Districts and scale these out as part of the Clean Energy Transition. The approach combines: Prototyping the Future through Integrated Planning and Design; Enabling the Future through Creation of a Common Energy Market; and Accelerating the Future through CommunityxChange with all stakeholders of the city. New forms of integrated spatial, social, political, economic, regulatory, legal, and technological innovations will deliver citizen observatories, innovation playgrounds, regulatory sandboxes, and Bold City Visions to engage civil society, local authorities, industry, and RTOs to scale up from PEBs to PEBs to Positive Energy Cities, supported by a distributed and modular energy system architecture that goes beyond nZEB. On top of this, the consortium will create a new energy market design coupled to consumer-driven innovation, developed in close working cooperation with national regulators, DSOs/CSOs, property developers, and local energy communities. Flexibility will be put at the core of the distributed energy system by creating new micro-grid operation, prosumer-driven Community System Operators, and new markets for peak shaving/RES trading to reduce grid investment needs and curtailment. Their aim is to realize Europe-wide deployment of Positive Energy Districts by 2050 and prepare the way for fully Positive Energy Cities.

O-CEI overarching goal is to pilot the imperative of accelerating the uptake and upscaling of innovative Cloud-Edge-IoT solutions, strengthening Europe’s competitiveness and open strategic autonomy by orchestrating cross-domain data sharing, minimising energy footprint, stimulating multi-sided marketplaces, and promoting open standards for virtualisation and interoperability. For doing so, O-CEI will feed with such innovative technologies, and a comprehensive framework, to eight multidimensional real-world pilots framed in key strategic sectors: electricity grid, electromobility, software-defined vehicles, agrifood and agriculture, logistics and urban environments. It will swiftly create and implement innovative solutions across the cloud continuum; and effectively address the needs of existing and emerging individual and cross-sector business value chains. By designing blueprints and providing utilities beyond the SotA, O-CEI will help project stakeholders (and 32 Open Call awardees) to achieve challenging objectives. All pilots are formed by technical and stakeholder actors covering the necessary value chains, having an outstanding cross-domain unifying thread: energy flexibility.