Education for Climate Community Café - How do you become an Energy Community?

AURORA - Joint event with the Education for Climate Group Community Café 10th September 2025 from 17.00hrs - 18.00hrs Topic School Energy Communities To join the event register here - https://education-for-climate.ec.europa.eu/community/challenge_hub/event/community-cafe-september, This is an exciting event where you can learn about how the Palomeras Cultural Centre School in Spain has pioneered the first school Energy Community in Madrid with the AURORA project. The school, in a working class area of Madrid, has installed solar energy on the roof tops of their buildings, along with two air source heat pumps to keep the classrooms cool in summer. Funds of €140,000 have been raised from their community, staff and parents of the school, along with students and professors from the Technical University of Madrid as part of a share offer. This means everyone can have a stake in the energy transition. Lower energy bills, no capital cost to the school and a small return on investments from everyone supporting the scheme. It really is true that such transformations not only lower carbon emissions, supporting efforts to reach net zero carbon, but they also lower costs by diverting what would have been fossil fuel profits, back into the local community. The renewable energy generated will also be tracked via the AURORA energy tracker app to allow investors to see the energy being generated and to offset their own personal carbon emissions based on the investment they have made. It will join other projects at Aarhus University Denmark and Ljubljana University Slovenia already connected to the AURORA Energy Tacker app . Could schools in your country follow their lead and be the first school in your town, in your city, moving away from fossil fuels towards the future of clean renewable energy. A teacher from the school will explain what it is has meant to the students and staff of the Palomeras Cultural Centre school in Spain. The whole café event will be an opportunity for open discussion, facilitated by Martin Brocklehurst from the AURORA PROJECT, so that you can understand how to follow the lead that has been set. Looking to the future EU Legislation has also recently changed allowing the export of surplus renewable energy from community energy schemes through the grid to be sold to users around the installation. Once enacted into National law this would allow the export of surplus energy from Schools during holiday periods to users around the school. A great idea for public swimming pools for instance seeking to heat the pool during the summer holidays when usage rates are at their highest. The future looks bright for community energy schemes. In the UK, once the Governments strange block on Power Purchase Agreements on public buildings is removed we can perhaps also follow the EU lead and recommence community energy schemes on schools buildings.

Call for abstracts Open Track on PANDEMIC AND STS - 8th STS Conference

We warmly encourage you to send your abstracts for the following track: How to Protect Communities from Sars CoV-2 through Co-production of Health and the Design of Commons-Based Ecosystems by Adopting Distributed Ledger Technologies? Convenors: Guido Boella, Vincenzo Giorgino, Valeria Poli, Sowelu Avanzo. Please, see the complete call for the submission guidelines below, or consult the complete list of tracks. The 8th STS Italia Conference will be hosted by the University of Trieste, Italy, June 17 through 19, 2021, by the Italian Society of Science and Technology Studies. It is our pleasure to announce that the calls for abstract are now open until December 18th, 2020. The conference will be an opportunity to present empirical and theoretical work from a variety of disciplines: sociology, anthropology, design, economics, history, law, philosophy, psychology and semiotics. The focal theme of the 8th STS Italia Conference will be "Dis/Entangling Technoscience: Vulnerability, Responsibility and Justice”. This broad theme refers to the complex and ambivalent role of technoscience and innovation in constituting societies – making possibilities flourish, but also creating new vulnerabilities. The conference will include 28 tracks, which are clustered into five thematic streams. The tracks focus on several topics, including: biomedicine, digital platforms and media, work and organizations, expertise and public policy, ethics of technology and innovation, and governance of science and technology at large. Abstracts (written in English, or in Italian in case of tracks in two language) should be submitted by December, 18 to the conference email address (stsitaliaconf@gmail.com) and to the emails of convenors' selected track. Track Convenor(s) will be responsible for reviewing, accepting/rejecting and organising submissions into their track. THEMATIC STREAMS · Biomedicine, bodies and technoscience; · Platforms, digital technologies and media environments; · Rethinking science, technology and innovation: emerging challenges; · Including, excluding and connecting through / within technoscience; · Governing and reshuffling technoscience and innovation processes; · Open Track: Science and Technology Studies in Post-socialist countries/in Central and Eastern European countries; · Open Track on PANDEMIC AND STS: How to Protect Communities from Sars CoV-2 through Co-production of Health and the Design of Commons-Based Ecosystems by Adopting Distributed Ledger Technologies?