African SCENe (Sustainable Community Energy Networks) is a 12-month feasibility study that will enable the characterisation and identification of schools within low-income suburban communities in Nairobi that have the potential to become clean energy hubs through innovative business models. These energy hubs will be capable of generating, storing and distributing clean energy for the community they serve, accelerating access to adequate, affordable, and reliable renewable energy in Kenya, whilst enhancing energy awareness and education, The proposed business models will remove the financial and technical burden from the schools, in line with learnings from past projects developed by the partners. Given challenges around grid reliability and supply, African SCENe will investigate how the business model could be defined to co-exist within the existing and future energy structures. Key to the proposition is the social benefits that can arise from increasing access to studying and cooking facilities that are powered by clean, safe and reliable electricity. SmartKlub's role is to develop the business model to enable the realisation of the energy hubs, with funded facilities being managed under a lease contract with the school. Edu-Cater Global will take the lead on utilising facilities to inform and enhance pupils and families' learning experience and awareness of clean energy subjects. They will use subcontractor Map Kibera to identify and access appropriate schools to work with and that can be proposed as future demonstrators. University of Nottingham's role is to develop the social, economic, policy and technical researches needed to support the project. FWD.London will ensure deliverability, replicability and scalability across sub-Saharan Africa, by utilising and growing existing supply chains where feasible or developing them from UK businesses. It aims to facilitate the adoption of sustainable business practices across Africa, helping to mitigate the adverse effect human development has on both the environment, and climate. They also seek to ensure that local communities benefit from the vast natural resources available to them. These benefits are unlocked through a combination of; skills training programmes, knowledge transfer initiatives and capital investment. The project team will be supported by an advisory board that includes Kenyan Power, the Institute of Energy Studies Research Kenya, the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group and the Kenya Renewable Energy Association. We are actively seeking to form partnerships across the region to achieve these aims and goals.

Easy Energy Engager is a new way for everyday people and businesses to save money on their energy bills. No longer will you have to be an energy expert to do the right thing for yourself or your community. Once you are registered, we will show you your energy usage in over the internet in the comfort of your home or business with simple pictures including satellite imagery. If there are savings to be made (and there nearly always are) we will display recommendations. Without obligation, you can then request quotations simply by clicking a single button. Without picking up a phone, a huge number of competing but accredited suppliers, will respond to your request. Behind the scenes, Easy Energy Engager will negotiate group-buy discounts for you and your neighbours that also join. You can read reviews of other people's experience in your area and with your potential suppliers. When you are ready, you can accept a quote to receive your energy makeover and start saving money and the planet. You can then tell your friends about your experience over Facebook and other social media channels so they can have the benefit of your experience.

Project Notch looks to accelerate the adoption of Community Energy Systems (CES). CES is a different way of generating and supplying heat and electricity to homes and commercial buildings - locally produced energy is used locally with minimal or no use of the national grid. The benefits are reduced cost and more efficient use of distributed renewables to reduce the overall carbon emissions from the energy system. Most of the necessary technologies are available but they are too expensive for consumers to invest in themselves and the business model is not in place that shows companies how they will make a return, so they dont invest. Project Notch starts with a blank sheet of paper: a new housing development in Nottingham’s Trent Basin. It brings together all the companies involved in the energy supply chain with the potential buyers of up to 120 homes on site. Involving heat and electricity the aim is to operate independent of the gas and electric grids. Using novel consumer engagement tools and a focus on business model development the consortium will develop and test business model templates that could be used by any developers of large scale housing projects.

SmartKlub and its collaborators will develop a free to use tool “Community Action Platform for Energy” (CAPE) in order to make it easy for communities and local suppliers to procure and supply energy efficiency or distributed energy projects at scale. CAPE combines various data sets, including satellite, energy and social information so that communities identify opportunities of highest need and impact for councils and community groups to act upon. By doing this, expertise and scale are socialised to allow citizens to address fuel poverty and sustainability goals without needing to become a lone expert, in order to successfully join the energy revolution. Suppliers (especially local companies with local know how) can then engage with a much larger group of customers with aligned needs, many times more cost effectively, without having to undertake mass marketing that has thus far failed. Suppliers simply pay a commission to access readymade projects. SmartKlub’s ambition is that CAPE allows many cities to scale community energy measures at a significant scale in order to achieve a tipping point in social energy objectives like fuel poverty and climate change.

SmartKlub is a start up with the aim of "Empowering Cities Together". It is creating new distributed energy project facilitation models to transform how cities and communities power themselves. It is actively working at city scale to join up the various actors of the energy supply chain, with city stakeholders, to co-create the projects required to build city scale distributed energy schemes and social capital. This is a complex multi-layered problem where easy sharing of best practice and creation of economies of scale are paramount to making community energy mainstream. SmartKlub has identified the need for a platform that implements a Local Energy Marketplace where supply chains use a city asset register to collaborate and form bespoke offers to communities, businesses and civic authorities alike. This allows integrated system thinking to be applied to disparate energy assets within a city. The platform will use an open data and mapping architecture as a free to use tool for suppliers to understand and propose scale solutions of current and future solutions and technologies.