by Rebecca Hueting, Deep Blue, project dissemination team
During last General Assembly, several projects involved in the BRIDGE initiative underlined the need for direct stakeholder engagement. RENAISSANCE project joined for the first time the yearly meeting at the European Commission in Brussel on 11th and 12th of February 2020.
In this article you can read my short report of the two-days conference plus some general conclusions.
Day 1 – New BRIDGE projects
During the presentation of new projects Our coordinator prof. Thierry Coosemans from VUB, introduced RENAISSANCE challenges and objectives. He focused on stakeholder engagement, stressing the need for participation of all involved actors right from the start. Currently we have already run interactive workshops in each European pilot site. End-users, platform providers, energy aggregators, energy cooperatives and system operators participated in the validated Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis. The MAMCA decision-making tool, developed by Prof. Dr. Cathy Macharis from VUB University, allows building consensus whereas needs and expectations from each category is taken into consideration. Its main purpose in the project framework is to envision most plausible scenarios in the forthcoming energy market.
Read more about MAMCA methodology:
MAMCA
Day 1 – Consumer and Citizen engagement
The overall support to the analysis of the social impact and the legal support to the local administrations and communities living in the pilots are key in the RENAISSANCE project. Indeed, building the path towards energy transition is one of the main goal of all projects taking part in the BRIDGE community. As project dissemination leader representative, I took part in the parallel session on “Consumer and Citizen engagement”. Smart-grid projects and consumer science projects shared best practices and methodologies with the aim of creating common knowledge about existing results.
As stated more than once by session moderators:
“we shall consider not reinventing the wheel each time we start a new project”.
Day 2 – CEER meets BRIDGE projects
On the second day RENAISSANCE project participated to the parallel session dedicated to discussion between BRIDGE projects and CEER.
While CEER shared concerns and expectations, BRIDGE projects offered multiple points of view emerging from recent research landscape. Discussions pointed not only at regulatory barriers but also to the potential links across key results and future energy policies.
Ms. Maarja Meitern from Bax&Company explained how the dutch pilot of Eemnes could start on-boarding citizens and local enterpreneurs in the Local Energy Community. Energy trading between local consumers and prosumers will be finally possible, thanks to a regulatory exemption granted by the Dutch government.
Watch the video to know more about Eemnes pilot:
Eemnes Pilot
Explore the other pilots:
Pilot Sites
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