This project will help towns and communities take real steps towards healthier, warmer homes by showing how whole streets can be improved together, rather than house by house. We will build on earlier work from the Net Zero Living programme and test our approach in three areas: Rossendale (Lancashire), Rochdale (Greater Manchester) and Bridgend (South Wales). The idea is simple but powerful: by working on many homes at once, we can cut costs, make it easier for local builders and suppliers to get involved, and give residents a clearer picture of the benefits. Over the course of the project, we will look closely at around 12 homes (4 in each area) to understand how well they keep in heat, how much energy they use, and where improvements can be made. We will monitor a percentage of these homes over the winter months to see how they perform in real life and identify the best ways to make them warmer, healthier, and cheaper to run. At the same time, we will be working on the bigger picture of delivery. This includes exploring how new local organisations, called Local Development Vehicles, could bring councils, residents, and businesses together to make retrofit easier to plan and finance. We will also work with local builders and tradespeople to assess what skills and capacity are needed to deliver these improvements at a larger scale. The project will connect with other national innovation and funding programmes to create a clear route to investment, so that once the testing is complete, the approach can be rolled out more widely. By planning ahead, we will ensure that the lessons learned in these three clusters can be shared with other places across the UK. Our findings will be written up in easy-to-use guidance packs and shared through workshops, community events, and online resources. This means that the benefits go well beyond the three areas where the work takes place, helping other towns and cities to move forward faster on their own net zero journeys. By the end of the project, we will have shown how street-by-street retrofit can be delivered in a way that is practical, affordable, and fair. The result will be a model that improves comfort and health for residents, creates skilled local jobs, and cuts carbon, leaving a lasting legacy for communities and the climate.

In Wales, there is a unique mandate for public sector bodies to demonstrate alignment of economic stewardship to the Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015\. This establishes a requirement for industrial decarbonisation, supported by the public sector, to improve the long-term wellbeing of local communities. This can be challenging for new net zero infrastructure projects, which can sometimes come into conflict with community priorities. In response to this challenge, innovative community energy models are seeing growing interest across Wales and the UK. This gives an organisation legally-accountable to the community (e.g. a Community Interest Company, CIC) a financial stake in new energy infrastructure. Profits generated from energy sales can be reinvested in community wellbeing projects, with energy infrastructure then becoming a source of community pride and local jobs, rather than an external disruptive presence with negative wellbeing impacts. The UK Government is currently seeking evidence on policy reforms needed to unlock community energy at scale. Challoch Energy's vision is to put communities at the heart of decarbonisation, to deliver a win-win-win-win for energy consumers, communities, commercial developers and energy networks. Challoch offers communities innovative products and services tailored to their needs, providing user-friendly technological foundations for Smart Local Energy Systems (SLES). This includes asset development services (MW-scale solar, wind and batteries) as well as Local Energy Operating System (LEOS) microgrid controllers. A particular Challoch specialism is enabling decarbonisation in areas with constrained grid capacity. This is especially true of rural areas, where renewable resource potential is greatest. This requires development of alternative routes to market for community-owned power, such as private wire connections to large customers. This project will identify and quantify opportunities for rural communities in south west Wales to supply power to nearby industrial customers, increasing Challoch's activities in the region from its office in nearby Bridgend County Borough. The result of subsequent community engagement and asset development will be substantially cheaper, local, zero-carbon power for businesses - increasing competitiveness and resilience while accelerating decarbonisation - plus tangible community benefits and improved stability of the rural electricity grid (operated by National Grid Electricity Distribution in the region). This work builds directly on previous grant-funded projects, focused on the pilot village of South Cornelly, Bridgend County Borough (15 minutes from Port Talbot). Following a successful project, Challoch will work closely with Net Zero Industry Wales and Innovate UK Business Growth to optimise their development strategy in south west Wales.

**Summary**: Net Zero Terrace Streets (NZTS) will produce a place based, whole systems, replicable and scalable model for decarbonisation of mixed-tenure terraced housing. It will support energy transition for left behind communities, reduce bills by over 80%, develop a solution for the hardest to decarbonise homes and provide a model for even the smallest local authorities to adopt to support delivery of net-zero targets. **Problem**: There are 10 million terraced homes in the UK. Many are not suitable for Air Source heat pumps due to space and noise constraints. The community we are focused on is not currently appropriate for heat zoning or centralised solutions and is dependent upon electric boilers, which are expensive to run and cumulatively, place a large load on the grid. This and similar communities rely on unplanned, unphased, and individualistic transition. However, individual homes will not deploy at the speed we need to decarbonise. Failure for uptake in ASHPs and retrofit to date (only approx. 7000 ASHPs in the first year of Boiler Upgrade Scheme), demonstrates that we have yet to find solutions that survive contact with individual householders. **Solution**: NZTS is a Smart Local Energy Solution (SLES) comprising a cluster approach to shared, ambient loop ground source heat pumps (GSHPs), community owned storage, solar photovoltaic (PV) EV car club and charging and local peer-to-peer Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs). NZTS will create a non-grant dependent alternative that can allow communities to access affordable, low carbon energy and healthy warm homes, at no upfront cost, reducing bills by over 80%. **Engagement**: Without community acceptance and uptake, critical mass cannot be attained. The approach is led by the community, for the community through a collaborative and co-production process. Community representatives (both elected members and other local leaders) will co-create a whole community approach that embeds change. **Impact**: The model is designed to allow smaller local authorities to participate, overcoming challenges on resource and finance whilst bringing inclusive growth, community wealth building, new jobs, skills and training, improved housing, and the correlated health benefits. It is a phenomenal opportunity for local communities and local authorities. Central to this ethical model is a non-extractive premise that enables a fair transition, both now and into the future as the benefits of smart meters, flexibility and SLES advance.

Future energy systems will integrate diverse, variable renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels, use sector coupling and waste heat recovery, and interact symbiotically with a variety of users. Seasonal thermal energy storages (sTES) are existential for peak-shaving and load-shifting in these systems and they increase the usability of decentrally generated thermal energy. INTERSTORES aims to achieve successful market acceptance, technological attractiveness and competitiveness by improving performance, cost efficiency and increased reliability. By pooling engineering, (hydro-)geological, environmental, and applied disciplines as well as expertise from different sectors, 14 partners from 9 countries will ensure a high exploitability through technology transfer measures. For this, INTERSTORES promotes the full-scale realization of two different sTES variants. Two demonstrators address one crucial concept of versatile sTES solutions in European’s future energy systems: The combination of several tuneable sTES.Overarching goal is proving the international market potential of novel Reno-sTES and Giga-CTES by demonstration of highly favourable techno-economic and environmental performance. With the unique opportunity of full-scale demonstration, INTERSTORES’ innovations will close critical gaps for arriving at reliable facilites, robust operational functioning and replicable implementation. The two solutions will reveal crucial differences regarding optimal design, integration potential on different scales, operating conditions, costs, environmental impacts and benefits. Finally, INTERSTORES will not only demonstrate application of planned innovation modules for sTES to project’s demo sites, but set a major focus on maximizing their replication potential. This will be achieved by complementing technological and digital developments at the demos with research on European transfer sites, regional markets and new business opportunities.