Category Archives: Blog

ZERO lexicon © De Vormforensen

Word Bingo as a baseline on grid congestion

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Starting a project with partners of different backgrounds, expertise and ways of working can be challenging: you need to understand each other, to get to know one another’s working habits, to see how you can complete each other in the project and adopt a workflow that suits all parties. When this does not work, tensions might arise out of misunderstandings, delays might occur out of incompatible working methods and, eventually, project objectives might not be achieved as partners’ ambitions differ.

At the same time, successful collaboration starts with taking the time to understand each other, discover how we work best together and develop a shared way of communicating and delivering.

In the EUI ZERO project, one way of addressing it was to organise a Word Bingo. As a tool to familiarise partners with each other and to adopt a common and jointly understood vocabulary, the Word Bingo is a grounding tool that should be applied by complex projects to ensure a good working basis as well as efficient and effective project delivery. Continue reading →

ZERO Zoom-In 1: ‘Unusual’ skills and perspective to engage the local community on energy transition

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The ZERO project is working with the Elderveld community in Arnhem to co-develop and implement solutions for local energy transition. Getting residents on board is therefore central to the success of the project and, for the first time, the Municipality of Arnhem experiments working with creative and artistic partners to engage the local community, raise their awareness and co-identify solutions to lower electricity peak demand, and avoid unnecessary grid expansions. In this Zoom-In, we present this journey, as well as its outcomes and learnings.

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Be.SHARE Zoom-In 1 : Setting up a governance model to co design the future management of a district heating

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It’s 2028. You are living opposite Park Maximilien in Brussels North District in a social housing. Next to you is the property manager of WhiteWood which hosts the European Commission’s Office for Infrastructure and Logistics in Brussels. Further away, a well-being officer from the ZIN a nearby coliving and office building…You have all gathered to discuss and exchange about the energy that you get from the Carbon Neutral Heating and Cooling Network set up as part of the EUI Be.SHARE project.

This was the initial vision of the Be.SHARE project: to embark users of the buildings connected to its Carbon Neutral Heating and Cooling Network (CNHCN) to make it more meaningful, while addressing directly all their varied needs. Now that the project was launched, the initial vision had to become reality. And for this, the project went on a co-creation journey to identify the actual forms such a governance could take, while precising its proposed ambitions, composition and mandates.

This Zoom-In deeps dive into the process for setting up this governance model: the initial scope and expectations, the co-creation process, the targeted groups, the baseline for the governance, and the eventual structure of the ‘Be.SHARE Lab’. We conclude by sharing some expected implementation challenges and their mitigation strategies as well some lessons for any other interested party.

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Did you know you could do THIS in a schoolyard, a library or a museum?

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Usually, you enter a school, when you are a pupil or a teacher. You go there to learn in classrooms, play in the schoolyards during breaks. As an adult, you don’t know how the inside of the school – building and yard – look like.

You go to a library to read, study or work, benefit from some calm and access to a variety of useful resources. You go to a museum to get acquainted or deepen your knowledge with a topic, a period of time or an artist.

What if you could also enjoy these places to get some freshness in the summer? How would it look like? Would you still go there for the same types of activities? Could you, as an adult, access the schoolyards?

That’s what the EUI Time2Adapt project has experimented during summer 2024 and 2025 and that we are now deep diving into! Continue reading →

‘We want to optimise the grid by making residents co-owners of the solution’

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On grid congestion the Netherlands and the solution proposed for ZERO

The Netherlands have long been pioneers in the energy transition and are now facing ambitious climate targets for 2030. Yet, because of this ambition and its related need for electricity, the energy grid is facing strong congestion.

Wieteke Hoftijzer, Ideation Consultant at the Innovation Hub of Alliander, an energy grid operator in the Netherlands, is enlightening us on the grid congestion and explaining the solution provided within the EUI ZERO project taking place in the Elderveld neighbourhood of the city of Arnhem. Continue reading →