Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona

The UP-STAIRS Project (UP-lifting Communities: Structuring collective Action for Sustainable local Transition and Identifying Regulatory Solutions for adopting frontier technologies and disruptive business models), which is financed by the European Horizon 2020 Programme and features the participation of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, was recently approved.

The aim of this initiative, which is led by the University College Cork and will mobilise a public-private consortium that includes 10 European partners from 7 different countries, is to build consumer confidence in technology related to energy efficiency and renewable energy. To do so, UP-STAIRS will promote the growth of the so-called sustainable energy communities to make progress towards the energy-savings goals set by the EU.

Sustainable energy communities
Sustainable energy communities are those in which the various community actors take part in producing, distributing, selling and investing in renewable energy, giving rise to local co-benefits such as job opportunities, greener and more affordable energy, energy self-sufficiency and community cohesion. Given the residential sector's impact on the final energy consumption, the need to speed up the transition to renewable energy sources and the trend towards and benefits of these kinds of decentralised communities, the UP-STAIRS Project will provide a common frame of reference to promote the design, implementation and monitoring of 5 pilot communities, each of which includes 2,000 consumers. The project will therefore help build consumer confidence in these models by addressing the legal, administrative and financial barriers that restrict their use.

AMB participation
The AMB, through its Ecology Department, will be involved throughout the project in a cross-cutting manner. Nevertheless, its primary focus will be on developing scalable economic models to sustain these measures and implementing and coordinating a pilot project. It will also take part in digitising the UP-STAIRS energy service, identifying regulatory barriers and disseminating the results. As part of this project, the AMB will manage a budget of €182,750.

The project will have a duration of 36 months (September 2020 - September 2023) and a total budget of €2,018,307.50.