SocialWatt: fighting energy poverty | edp.com

Goals

The main goal of SocialWatt is to support obligated parties under Article 7 of the Energy Efficiency Directive to develop, adopt, test and spread innovative energy poverty schemes across Europe.

 The expected contributions from this project are:

• Development of tools to support utilities and energy suppliers contribute to the fight against energy poverty;
• Bridging the gap between energy companies and social services by promoting collaboration and implementing knowledge transfer and capacity building activities;
• Implementing and replicating innovative schemes to alleviate energy poverty.

The tools developed within the scope of the project will be able to identify energy poverty among energy customers, elaborate Energy Poverty Action Plans after having evaluated and selected energy poverty schemes and assess the overall procedure.

The energy poverty schemes will be implemented around Europe, namely in Croatia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Romania and Spain. Through the implementation of the schemes in this pilot countries, the project aims to learn from the challenges faced during implementation to ease replication of the schemes.

Highlights

• Consortium formed by 13 partners spread around Europe, including utilities and charitable organizations.
• The developed solutions will be demonstrated in 6 European countries.

Role NEW R&D

• EDP NEW entered the project on the 1st of March 2022;
• The main outputs from this project for EDP NEW are two documents: Policy Brief and the Energy Action Plan.
• Due to late entry into the project, EDP NEW will not be a demonstrator, as opposed to the other partners

In WP1 EDP NEW will contribute to the definition of the use cases’ requirements and the system architecture leveraging from its experience as energy utility.

In WP2 EDP NEW will do a simulation using the identification tool to check how it performs in the Portuguese market and evaluate schemes to tackle energy poverty in Portugal. In addition, EDP NEW will develop an Energy Poverty Action Plan with schemes that are recommended to be implemented.

In WP3 EDP NEW will co-organize a training seminar around the topic of energy poverty, in which the SocialWatt project, its tools and some of the schemes developed will be presented.

In WP4 EDP NEW will develop a policy brief regarding the implementation of energy efficiency obligation schemes to alleviate energy poverty. For the knowledge sharing activities, EDP NEW will organize replication meetings with an energy agency or social service around the topic of energy poverty and the SocialWatt project.

Partners