COMETS aimed at investigating Collective Action Initiatives – CAIs (such as energy communities, energy cooperatives and similar community based initiatives) as the main driver of social innovation in the energy sector.
More specifically, the objectives of COMETS are:
1. To build robust knowledge on social innovative processes in the energy transition as implemented by CAIs. COMETS will generate and test new knowledge about technical, institutional, economic, social and cultural factors and their interaction that may facilitate or hinder sustained activities of CAIs. The project will provide new tools for the assessment of CAIs performance and will provide aggregate estimates of their current and potential contribution to the energy transition.
2. To provide tools and recommendations for improving the start-up, steering, and up-scaling of CAI activities. COMETS will co-design the tools with practitioners, enabling changes in the current situation and generating blueprints for future initiatives.
The ambition is to trigger a shift in the scientific comprehension of the dynamics behind the development of such initiatives and to produce novel knowledge and tools to support the decision making process at the level of CAIs and of the main public and private actors on the energy system. The deep understanding of the trajectories of these initiatives has been growing relevance in recent years in view of the implementation at the national level of the EU directives (2018/2001, 2019/944) that paved the way for CAIs establishment.
The overall objective of COMETS is to investigate CAIs and all their associated social factors. In addition to social factors, the complexity of the energy transition results also from the co-evolution of technological and institutional factors.
The expected impacts of COMETS is many-fold. Firstly, the project will advance the scientific knowledge on the motives, desires, objectives and barriers of such CAIs and their historical and future role in the energy transition. Building on the information gathered and tested for its robustness, COMETS will co-develop and test supportive tools together with CAI members, decision makers and the scientific community. These stakeholders will then be able to exploit the main outputs of COMETS, namely a Supporting Platform for CAIs, the enhanced knowledge base, scenarios and roadmaps for spreading CAI models, even after the project is concluded.
Among many others reuslts all avaialble on the projects' website (
http://www.comets-project.eu/(öffnet in neuem Fenster)). the following research ouputs deserved to be mentioned for their relevance in maximising the impact of the project:
a) Definition of a typology of CAIs able to provide the descriptive dimensions and the KPI determinants of CAIs in the energy transition. The analysis profiles CAIs to offer survey-based and qualitative criteria to characterize CAIs themselves and their performance in driving technical, economic, and social innovation in the energy transition (deliverable 3.3). The survey data have been opened in Zenodo and are avaialble at
https://zenodo.org/record/6772350#.YrxD1nZByUk(öffnet in neuem Fenster).
b) Around 30 Comparative case studies for an in-depth comprehension of conditions, factors and barriers for CAIs development in the six COMETS countries and their potential in terms of social innovation of activities and services to meet a social need (deliverable 4.2).
c) Six participatory case-studies through which it was possible to defin scenarios and roadmaps that gathers the results of a participatory activities aimed at defining possible and desirable futures for the CAIs involved (deliverable 5.2).
d) A manual for inspiring policy design at EU and National Level that provides recommendations at supranational level and suggests roadmaps at national level to support decision makers designing strategies to boost the growth and wide spread of the CAIs and, ultimately, increase social innovation (deliverable 5.3).
e) A EU wide Inventory of CAIs that consists of a priceless new open database with around 10000 entries reporting data about CAIs all over Europe. The inventory has been opened in the platform dataverse.no and is now available at
https://dataverse.no/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.18710/2CPQHQ(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
