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The Danube Energy Communities Accelerator (DECA) project aims to test how citizen-led renewable energy actions can be accelerated across the Danube Region; making a meaningful impact on the region’s transition to higher renewable energy use, energy independence, climate neutrality, and prosperity.  

Accelerating renewable energy uptake is critical to reducing dependency on imported fossil fuels and reducing the vulnerability of communities in the Danube Region. Currently, available renewable energy resources in the region are underutilised - when they provide ample opportunities for increasing energy security, local prosperity and moving the region towards climate neutrality. 

Citizen-owned energy systems are increasingly recognised as a key driver of a just energy transition towards renewables. Community energy action enables decentralised RES production and more equitable local sharing of value generated from RES. Co-benefits of community energy action include cost-savings, employment opportunities, improved energy security, community reinvestment and shared financial returns, skills development, improved social connections, resilience, and people being warmer and healthier in their homes. Citizen-led renewable energy community initiatives are therefore an innovative and important way for communities to respond to current energy, climate and economic challenges. 

Unfortunately, community energy action remains under-developed and inadequately supported in the Danube Region. To change this, we believe that communities need: 

1. Capacity development targeted to help citizens and organisations develop the skills and confidence they need for creating impactful community energy actions. 

2. Solutions to support creation of pipelines of local community energy actions that will have the greatest benefits 

3. Mechanisms to effectively sustain acceleration support for community energy action through national hubs and a regional alliance for scaling across the region. 

The DECA project aims to address these common challenges through jointly developed solutions, pilots and a strategy for accelerating community energy across the region. Through pooling of knowledge, experiences, skills, networks and expertise, this transnational collaboration and co-creation process will enable our 12 diverse and experienced project partners to jointly develop, promote and adopt the following common solutions to shared challenges: 

1. Community Energy Capacity Development Solution (Output 1.1) – trainings covering the fundamentals of community energy initiatives and social enterprise skills, this will be jointly developed, tested (Output 1.2), then refined for adoption and ongoing use. 

2. Community Energy Project Pipelines Toolkit (Output 2.1) - including a core methodology for robust community energy action development and a set of replicable, innovative community energy action concepts that can be adopted and tailored to local applications. 

These solution will have been tested through application in local pilot projects (Output 2.2), then refined for adoption and ongoing use. 

These outputs will benefit the whole community energy ecosystem in the region, which comprises of citizens and community groups, support organisations (sectoral agencies, NGO’s, utilities, education institution), policy makers and strategic bodies (local, regional, national authorities and territorial institutions) and private sector (business support organisations and SME’s that are technology, service and product providers for renewable energy systems). 

Potential solutions will be tested through piloting in 9 countries of the Danube programme area: Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, Austria, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Hungary, Romania and Serbia. 

Ultimately, we will use learnings from this work to develop a Danube Community Energy Acceleration Strategy (Output 3.1) - for a network of community energy acceleration hubs that will sustain and expand support for community renewable energy action across the Danube Region, into the future. 

Together, the developed solutions and strategy will provide a powerful common platform from which to accelerate innovation and action on community energy across the region, and make a meaningful impact on the region’s clean energy transition. 

By the end of the project we will ensure to have activated a regional alliance of project partners and wider stakeholders committed to adopt, use, extend and scale the project outputs. Throughout this project, we will generate and share with a wide audience the innovative solutions, pilot results, the strategy, insights and lessons learned.