AURORA is part of the EU’s renowned “Horizon 2020” programme. It started in December 2021 and will receive a total of €4.6 million in funding over the next 3.5 years. As a so-called Innovation Action, the project has a particularly applied focus and implements its innovative solutions directly in practice.
Approximately 7,000 citizens across five locations in Denmark, England, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain, will join forces to become ‘Near-zero emission’ citizens. As ‘citizen scientists’, these communities will also crowd-fund photovoltaic facilities locally to produce a total of ca. 1 megawatt of renewable energy.
A mobile app – also to be developed as part of the project – will allow participants to monitor their own behavioural patterns of heating and cooling, transport and use of electricity. In return, they will receive tailored suggestions on how they can lower their energy demand and reduce their costs. Approaches like these are meant to engage particularly younger generations and empower them to become agents of change beyond the project itself. Through workshops and hands-on activities, the project will encourage citizens to change their behaviour and attitudes towards energy.
The four locations in continental Europe will be established around university campuses as hubs for social innovation; a fifth demonstrator will be established in one of England’s economically most deprived regions, where the authorities declared a state of ‘Climate Emergency’ in December 2018.
The European Union has set itself ambitious goals to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis: to cut down greenhouse gas emissions by 55% within less than a decade compared to the reference year 1990, and to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Three quarters of these emissions are a direct result of how people produce and consume energy. The AURORA project will allow citizens to play an active role in transforming this sector by giving them the tools to achieve these ambitions. The project will enable citizens to become both a producer and consumer of energy (‘prosumer’). It is going to foster local energy communities, powered by leading-edge photovoltaic technology, and thereby aims to transform the energy system at large, to make it more transparent, fair and sustainable.
The AURORA project consortium comprises nine institutions from six countries.
