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SMEs play a crucial role in economies by providing large scale employment and contributing to much of the GDP. Despite their vital role, SMEs face a plethora of challenges, and often, the aspect of energy efficiency is overlooked. This paper conducted studies across Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, France, and Germany and devised an easy and ready-to-adopt approach to improve energy efficiency in SMEs. The new approach is based on a maturity matrix that supports continuous learning and development and provides expert recommendations on energy efficiency for SMEs around the world. The expert recommendations are based on a final score and aim to address the various challenges that SMEs face, such as limited access to knowledge and lack of awareness of energy efficiency. The approach may be easily adopted by any SME around the world.

Cities are at the centre of the debate to mitigate climate change. A considerable number of cities have already made commitments to sustainability transitions through the introduction and integration of green strategies. Moreover, in the past few years, Europe has witnessed an increase in the development of smart cities and advancement towards creating more sustainable cities. At the moment, an innovative concept in smart city development involves Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) that further encourage districts and cities to become carbon neutral. This paper looks at the five cities of Maia, Reykjavik, Kifissia, Kladno and Lviv that are a part of an ongoing H2020 project. The purpose of the paper was to understand the status quo of energy transition in these five cities as they embarked on the PEDs journey and identify associated challenges and benefits that PEDs brought to each city. The information was collected through a knowledge gap survey, City Vision 2050 workshop, discussions during the City Forum and individual interviews with city representatives. Cities across Europe and beyond may find themselves in a similar situation, and therefore, this paper also provides brief set of checkpoints to prepare new cities for the PED journey, thus enabling them to transition towards PEDs more efficiently.

In urban transformation, no solution works without citizen support. With increasing numbers of building technologies and large-scale urban development on its way across cities, it has become vital to keep citizens informed, engaged, and content with the new changes. This paper looks at citizen engagement in Espoo (Finland) and Leipzig (Germany), and it determines whether the cities are ready for developing and implementing positive energy districts (PEDs). The authors studied the cities’ operations and current citizen engagement methods to understand how the efforts could be combined and improved. The analysis indicated that the city of Espoo already has a well-established system that continuously promotes citizen engagement at various levels, and combining the available infrastructure with company experts on citizen participation will allow Espoo to seamlessly transition towards PEDs in the near future. The city of Leipzig has a rich experience due to several national projects and participation in an earlier European project, which enabled the city to set clearer goals for the future and modify existing citizen methods. As lighthouse cities, findings from Espoo and Leipzig are also aimed at cities across Europe and beyond to boost development of PEDs together with citizens.

Background There have been numerous research papers focusing on improving energy consumption and energy behaviour in domestic and residential contexts. However, workplaces and especially industry settings have gained less attention in scientific literature, even though the industry sector is one of the largest energy consumers in the world. This article introduces a methodological framework that utilizes the energy culture concept, to support understanding the factors that influence energy culture at business industry companies. Methods Building on the concept of energy culture, we introduce an interdisciplinary method, which assesses organizations’ energy culture from different perspectives and recognizes the possibilities for sustainability transitions. To validate this method, the developed energy culture survey has been verified by 27 expert participants from different industry-related companies located in Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Germany France, and Austria. Results Our analysis highlights the need to consider diverse, interdisciplinary aspects to create a successful method for enhancing energy culture in the industrial sector. This will take into consideration human aspects, related to cognitive norms, beliefs, and aspirations, as well as to human interaction with the material world. Conclusions Industrial energy cultures context differs from domestic and residential contexts, and the knowledge from one context cannot be transferred to another context as such. Based on investigated studies undertaken for residential, office, and other sectors and the lessons learned, we developed a systematic method for energy culture understanding in industries. Energy managers may use it, as well as other individuals involved in energy culture issues in the industrial business sector, to evaluate the state of energy culture and engage employees towards new energy-related practices.