On 2 and 3 May 2018, The Urban Agenda for the EU Partnership on Energy Transition held its 4th Partnership meeting in Pamplona, Spain.

The meeting focused on developing concrete actions which can be delivered to the European Commission by the end of summer. To identify and further develop the major fields of actions, three Work Streams have been prepared. They represent all the practical work done during the meeting in Pamplona and consist of several action proposals.  

The first Work Stream focused on energy supply, generation and storage. The partners emphasized the need to develop a financing scheme and a related working group. The map is proposed to explain the current bottlenecks in access to funding and intellectual property. They further discussed possible obligations and encouragements on waste heat generation into the heat networks. Lastly, they recommended the EU carbon tax to cover sectors not covered by ETS.

Within the scope of the second WorkStream, the partners focused on management and planning and proposed six actions:

• Improving and harmonizing across the EU competences of municipalities in the context of integrated energy planning (e.g. introducing a minimal set of municipal competences)
• All planning processes to become more interrelated and interdependent
• Link the integrated energy masterplans of municipalities in order to access funds for energy transition projects
• Obliging the grid operators to provide consumers with smart meters without additional costs for the consumers
• Developing guidelines on EU level for municipalities to develop integrated plans for improved energy efficiency on the local level
• Obliging energy utilities to improve the energy data accessibility for all.

The third Work Stream was about Energy Consumption and enhancing civic engagement in energy transition with the aim of changing energy behaviour through involving citizens. The Partners discussed developing guidelines for cities to access private/public money for retrofitting. They indicated the need for enhancing the retrofitting effectiveness by properly developing the next round of actions. In this context, the partners suggested that the best actions would consist of best practice sharing, guidance, and financing as well as a guideline on developing and implementing renovation strategies.

In light of the open discussions, the partners agreed upon the relevance of the potential actions that have been identified on all three of the working groups (Work Streams). A further emphasis has been put on receiving feedback from the key actors on the upcoming Sustainable Energy Week 4-7 June 2018.