Project description
Women as leaders of renewable energy shift in heating and cooling
The heating and cooling market needs to urgently shift towards renewable energy sources. Women hold great potential as leaders of this shift, driving the clean energy transition and the campaign towards meeting the EU’s climate goals. The EU-funded W4RES project will support the uptake of renewable energy in heating and cooling (RHC) from a gender-driven perspective. It will take into consideration framework conditions and regional specificities, assessing and mitigating obstacles. Moreover, it will build on gender-disaggregated awareness from the market and successful cases of women leading RHC programmes to develop cost-effective and flexible support initiatives with high reapplication potential. Gender-responsive monitoring will evaluate the performance of the initiatives and produce evidence-based knowledge to guide and facilitate their reapplication in other contexts.
Objective
Women hold great potential as agents of change, driving the clean energy transition and getting us closer to meeting the EU’s climate and energy targets for 2030. W4RES taps into this potential to support the uptake of renewable energy in heating and cooling (RHC), a market that urgently needs to shift more to RES. We start with a deep dive into framework conditions and regional specificities of 8 diverse yet representative markets in Europe, assessing enablers and barriers to RHC uptake. Building on gender-disaggregated insights from market actors and stakeholders as well as successful cases of women leading RHC projects, we develop a suite of flexible and cost-effective support measures with high reapplication potential. We then deploy our measures on the field offering technical and business support to cut down project development timings and efforts as well as to sidestep legal, institutional and financial challenges, setting in motion feasible and sustainable business models fit to market. In parallel, we empower decision-makers to leverage a gender perspective into their projects and policies to improve acceptance, while raising awareness to foster demand for RHC. Along the way, a gender-responsive monitoring and evaluation framework will gauge the performance and impact of our measures, providing us with the intel required to turn them from solutions fit for a set of local challenges to integrated solutions that can address diverse policy and market needs across Europe. We use this intel as a catalyst to foster co-creation, mutual learning and international cooperation for frameworks more conducive to RHC uptake at local, regional national and EU level, based on cost-effective support schemes and lower financing costs for RHC facilities. In the process, we coordinate our actions with relevant initiatives and offer tools to facilitate the reapplication of our results, ensuring their long-term sustainability as viable solutions to supporting RHC uptake.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
CSA - Coordination and support actionCoordinator
551 33 Kalamaria, Thessaloniki
Greece
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.