On the 11th and 12th of July 2024 all partners met in Colmar, France, for the first Consortium Meeting following the Kick Off Meeting in January in Bologna.
During the meeting, we discussed how to structure future Hubs, how to characterize them, and what services and business models to propose. Moreover, we shared best practices for engaging and supporting pilot projects, defined the structures and onboarding activities related to meetings and public events.
On day 1, AURA-EE and AAE provided an overview of the national and regional hubs for energy communities in France and together with ITE shared a mutual presentation on the methodology applied to each task of WP2 (design and validation of a replicable integrated service model), providing an update on the current state of the relevant activities. AESS then presented the roadmap for the activation of the HUBs. The discussion among the partners focused mainly on the tools used for the feasibility studies, as well as on the issues of revenue distribution and assignment of public assets to ECs. The tools needed to implement new devices for established ECs, such as shared mobility and citizens-led renovation were discussed. In the afternoon AURA-EE guided a workshop on collecting the knowledge of the territory: preparing the interviews with local actors and public authorities, aimed at concluding with the definition of the core questions, targets and strategies for the interviews and the analysis protocol. On day 2 the Consortium focused on barriers hampering the development of the HUBs and on the organizations of events on local, regional and national level to create an expanded local forum able to identify common strengths and weaknesses, in order to present such inputs as policy recommendations at the different levels.