Some progress beyond the state of the art were already visible during the 1st reporting period with the decision to develop the European Energy Social Innovation Platform (EESIP), which was launched during the 2nd reporting period and it provided an added value to the SocialRES project through its positioning at European level in the field of social innovation for the renewable energy sector. In addition to that, the development of the world's first crowdfunding council bond and the EU first council green bond has provided another added value to the SocialRES project in the achievement of energy democracy.
In the context of the European Green Deal, the SocialRES project analysed the crucial role that citizen acceptance and support for renewable energies will play achieving the ambitious political target of net neutrality by 2050.
There are two main potential impacts in the SocialRES project. The first potential impact is related to the provision of a better understanding of socioeconomic, gender, sociocultural, and socio-political factors of social innovation and their interrelations with technological, regulatory, and investmentrelated aspects, in support of the goals of the Energy Union and particularly its research and innovation pillar. The second potential impact is related to the development of practical recommendations for using the potential of social innovation to further the goals of the Energy Union, namely, to make Europe's energy system more secure, sustainable, competitive, and affordable for Europe's citizens.
A first step in developing practical recommendations was utilizing a qualitative approach to find empirical evidence of the barriers and enablers that energy communities, crowdfunders, and aggregators face in the EU context. In depth interviews with stakeholders from across the EU, provided depth that the secondary literature could not, and empirically validated some of the theoretical arguments the research is centred on. The results of this analysis were presented in the White Paper on Good Policy Practice. In the next steps, the SocialRES project provided policy recommendations on how the role of social innovations can be strengthened, based on evidence gathered from the bottom up, including all stakeholders; the citizens, the policymakers, and the social innovations themselves, taking into account their diversity across the EU.
