The focus of the project is to gain a better understanding in how to set up and roll out energy communities and energy efficiency services. The project builds on the knowledge and work within the EU Bridge initiative, ETIP SNET and others. In order to deliver this project successfully, the consortium includes a complementary group of experts on social science, policy and regulation, implementation, energy aggregation and energy service developers.

The project focusses on 3 levels of Energy Communities:

• those existing at the start of the project and included in the work plan as such;
• those that will be initiated throughout the project, and
• those not directly partnering in the project, but benefiting from the exchange and expertise of DECIDE.

All together they provide a set of complementary and geographically well-spread cases covering social housing as well as middle class and upper-class neighbourhoods in pilots based in Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands.

The pilots will deliver the necessary cases for a sound outreach built on an extensive social science basis. The project will work on identifying which kind of individuals and groups need what kind of communication and interaction to be motivated to join; i.e. work on identifying stakeholder segmentation to reach maximum input by targeted actions and prioritization in stakeholder segments. Different methods will be tested and evaluated with the different identified groups, including techniques as intergenerational learning.