PLANtoACT
PLANtoACT tackles a key challenge faced by Local and Regional Authorities (LRAs) across Europe: turning ambitious clean energy transition plans into practical, on-the-ground action. The project works with five different pilot regions in France, Italy, Romania, Germany and Portugal to create an innovative, integrated energy planning framework that aligns strategies across various levels of governance and different sectors.
Local and regional authorities often lack the capacity, integrated methods and organisational structures needed to deliver and implement clean energy transition plans effectively, including aligned sectoral strategies such as heating and cooling plans. To address this, PLANtoACT develops, demonstrates and promotes a stakeholder-driven, action-oriented and spatially detailed integrated energy planning approach.
This approach generates transition pathways and strategies that are aligned across multiple levels (national, regional and municipal) and sectors (electricity, heating and cooling, industry, transport), with particular emphasis on comprehensive heating and cooling strategies. A key part of the project is the Implementation Roadmap Phase, which bridges the gap between conceptual planning and actual delivery by setting out detailed actions with timescales and clear priorities.
The project’s knowledge hub acts as an online repository of resources, good practice and tailored capacity-building programmes to improve LRAs’ skills in technical, legal, financial, administrative and social innovation aspects. It also includes innovative multi-level governance structures and insights from co-creation processes. PLANtoACT will apply these solutions in the five pilot regions, each involving a pilot city or province to test the multi-level approach.
Under the project, five regional and at least five city/province clean energy transition strategies will be developed or updated, along with at least five heating and cooling strategies — all with a strong emphasis on actionable implementation roadmaps. These roadmaps will contain specific, prioritised actions that are aligned with local political timetables.
The project will also identify potential sources of finance for the priority actions — drawing from national, regional and European funding — and set up customised monitoring frameworks to track the progress and impact of the clean energy transition in each pilot region.
Expected outcomes include:
- The development of ten new or updated Clean Energy Transition strategies and five heating and cooling strategies.
- Training for 108 policymakers and public officers in technical, financial, legal and administrative skills.
- The creation of an open-source energy planning framework and a comprehensive knowledge hub.
- The establishment of multi-level governance structures to support better coordination.
- Projected energy savings of 840 GWh per year and renewable energy generation of 510 GWh per year.
- A reduction of 289,000 t CO₂-equivalent per year in greenhouse gas emissions.
Project Contact
Juliana Nadalutti
Communications Officer
Team Members
Project Officer
