Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CLEAR 2.0 (enabling Consumers to Learn about, Engage with, Adopt and regulate Renewable energy technologies 2.0)

Teaser

The successful story of the first EU funded CLEAR project (IEE 13-588) – enabling Consumers to Learn about, Engage with and Adopt Renewable energy technologies - will continue from September 2017 with Clear 2.0. It will actively guide consumers through all the stages leading...

Summary

The successful story of the first EU funded CLEAR project (IEE 13-588) – enabling Consumers to Learn about, Engage with and Adopt Renewable energy technologies - will continue from September 2017 with Clear 2.0. It will actively guide consumers through all the stages leading to the purchase of domestic renewable and low-carbon energy technologies. It has the objective to enable consumers to become more aware, active players, to save money and to easily become “prosumers”.

Strategy
The Clear 2.0 project will accompany consumers through all the stages leading to the purchase and the correct efficient use of domestic renewable and low-carbon energy technologies. It will focus as well on changing behavior and optimization of existing installations.
The main needs of a home, including heating/cooling and electricity production (including storage and monitoring systems) will be addressed through a consumer-centric approach. The aim is to change behavior and form collective consumer groups to support the purchase of renewable energy systems such as photovoltaic installations, batteries, pellet stoves and heat pumps for heating and cooling.
The four major barriers (awareness, behavior, stability of legislation and price) to the investment in RES will be directly addressed with the aim to achieve a higher consumer engagement.
BEUC and the consumer organizations will focus their advocacy work on relevant legislative developments in order to overcome existing barriers and facilitate consumers’ participation in the energy market. It will distill policy lessons to create a favorable and stable national and European policy framework for the benefit of all European consumers.

Objectives
CLEAR 2.0’s objective is to lower market barriers to the purchase of RES, hence raising consumers capacity to take informed decisions. The result should be a significant uptake in the purchase of renewable energy solutions (RES) by European consumers and therefore an important contribution to the 2020 European targets:
The key steps that are to be implemented to achieve CLEAR’s objective are the following:
- Integrating existing renewable energy web communities in Belgium, Portugal, Spain and Italy in consumer organisations’website to have an even large outreach. The communities will provide innovative ways to share experiences and know-how, exchange best practices, watch how-to videos and review systems and local installers;
- ‘hooking’ consumers with independent and expert information gained out of laboratory tests on micro-generation technologies. Test results were translated into articles will provide the consumer with relevant RE information and were widely circulated through consumer magazines and websites and spread via national media;
- raising the consumer capacity to take informed decision with personalized decision-making tools. These range from an interactive tool enabling consumers to find out which technologies are suitable for their needs and property, to investment tools enabling householders to find out how long it might take for a system to pay for itself and how much money and energy they could save;
- gaining attention and getting consumers involved in the CLEAR renewable energy web community, through existing well-established communication channels. Consumer organisations’ magazines are statistically read by three to four persons per household, ensuring an outreach of more than five million people in Europe. Furthermore, CLEAR leverages on the consumer organisations’ brand trust for a further multiplication of RE messages via the national media and word of mouth;
- activating consumers to purchase RE technologies through incentives that bring down cost like group purchase schemes. This has build upon the relevant experience of CLEAR group purchases;
- Working on the future energy transitions and foreseen trends analyzing, via monitoring of existing families, and optimizing self-consumption (batteries, electric car

Work performed

The project is half a way and it has already brought many interesting results.
Nine Group purchases or campaigns were launched in the 6 countries reaching over 32.000 consumers purchasing RES technologies.
Slovenia and Czech Republic have launched their first group purchases on RES technologies with amazing results.
Household monitoring has been launched in all the countries (with some difficulties) and the first interesting results are appearing (as the first publications).
Testing of products have been done (with own funds of consumer organisations) and the results have been exploited for organizing group purchases as well as for advocacy and policy recommendations.

Final results

The project expect to reach the objective fixed in the Grant agreement.
So far neither fundamental deviation nor sign of major issues that could put in peril the results.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.clear2-project.eu/home/on-the-ground/objectives.