BECoop – Unlocking the community energy potential to support the market uptake of bioenergy heating technologies

  • Dates: November 2020 – October 2023
  • Project web: https://www.becoop-project.eu/
  • Leader: WR
  • Grant agreement number: 952930
  • Funded by:

     

DESCRIPTION

While community energy is about to play a huge role for the future energy transition, bioenergy has a very slow development in decentralised energy production. BECoop’s ambition is to foster a broad deployment of bioenergy technologies in the heating sector (across Europe by providing all the necessary conditions and support tools for unlocking the underlying market potential of community bioenergy. By using BECoop support services and tools, energy communities and authorities will be able to (i) mobilize citizens around existing or new community bioenergy initiatives, (ii) boost local bioenergy demand by improving its image and social acceptance, and (iii) increase feasibility of their endeavors by identifying suitable technical, business and financial solutions, as well as by pooling expertise and partnerships from the wider EU bioenergy ecosystem. In order to showcase and build trust to our approach, we pilot our to a complementary set of 4 cases across Europe, targeting existing energy communities seeking to include bioenergy heating projects, and local/national authorities aiming at initiating novel bioenergy community structures in support of their clean energy transition goals. BECoop moves beyond local challenges as we replicate our concept to more EU cases, thus, improving the robustness and attractiveness of community bioenergy investments. BECoop will also create links between the international Bioenergy Community, increase its audience, and foster new partnerships. Relevant policy and regulatory structures will be empowered with empirical evidence indicating ways to transfer the community energy approach in bioenergy and heating. Finally, the project is backed by a multidisciplinary consortium covering all relevant stakeholders and knowledge requirements. It also includes key stakeholders that are considered natural recipients of its results (existing energy communities, RESCoop Federations and local/national authorities).

OBJECTIVES

  • Analyse the community market potential and identify the drivers and barriers for the uptake of bioenergy technologies in the community energy field.
  • Develop and fine-tune a suite of supporting resources, tools and services for community bioenergy heating project development, customised to the identified market uptake challenges.
  • Create new bioenergy heating communities and boost the overall demand for bioenergy through increased social acceptance, capacity building and behavioral change.
  • Deploy the BECoop support scheme for the market uptake of community bioenergy heating projects, demonstrate their reduced development efforts and assess their impact in 4 diverse contexts.
  • Empower the community bioenergy ecosystem to scale across Europe through knowledge transfer and replication activities.
  • Engage and empower policy makers towards the uptake of community bioenergy at regional, national and EU scale.
  • Disseminate and communicate the results of the project to a wide audience, establishing synergies with relevant initiatives, while also ensuring the exploitation of results.

CIRCE'S ROLE

  • CIRCE, will act as WP2 Leader responsible for the design and development of a series of technical tools and services for the support of the bioenergy communities.
  • In (Τ2.1) provide the framework and methodologies for the current status evaluation methods towards bioenergy community applications. Develop an online repository of tools in support of the development and operation of community bioenergy initiatives (Τ2.2). The online toolkit will consist of digital social innovation tools, bioenergy related, financial and mapping tools and CIRCE with other partners will establish the specific directions for the exploitation of the toolkit in purpose of the bioenergy market uptake efforts.
  • In Task 2.3 CIRCE will test an online market environment, hosted on its existing platforms, and gather participants’ feedback about the use of e-market tools in the technical services provision which will be designed in the following tasks. In Task 2.4 with other technical and business partners CIRCE will develop a catalogue of the technical services that will be offered, complementary to the tools, for the support of the bioenergy heating communities.
  • CIRCE will serve as the technical support partner to the pilot area partner in Spain, GoiEner.

PARTNERS

Logotipo CIRCE a color con recuadro gris sin leyenda
WR
GOIENER
esek
IEECP
CERTH
QPLAN
FIPER
CBS
OBS
WUELS
SEV