The 3M EUR funding is for the “W4RES” project, which is looking at scaling-up the involvement of women in supporting and accelerating market uptake of renewable energy sources for heating and cooling.
The project consortium consists of 12 partners from 8 countries and it is coordinated by Q-plan International Advisors headquartered in Greece.
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. The project starts 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, a suite of flexible and cost-effective support measures with high reapplication potential will be developed.
Consequently, the measures will be deployed 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, the project will 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 the 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. This intel will be used 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.
The project has a duration of 36 months and is slated to kick-off in January 2021.
For more information, please contact secretariat@pedal-consulting.eu.
