CSSC Lab

City Storage and Sector Coupling

Field of action: Energy Transition

Project goals: The main objective of CSSC Lab is to familiarize the municipalities and smaller cities in the Danube region with innovative approaches to solutions in the field of sector coupling, i.e. the networking of power generation, primarily from renewable energy sources, with the main consumption sectors of heat and transport. This is intended to improve the energy security and energy efficiency of the smaller towns and municipalities in the Danube region and to increase their contribution to the achievement of the EU climate targets.

Project area: Danube Region

Duration: 07/2020 bis 12/2022

Background

Sector coupling, i.e. the linking of the sectors electricity, heat, transport via energy storage and energy converters, should be an important component of energy system transformation in the future. The promotion of sector coupling systems in municipalities is essential for this.

Implementation

CSSC Lab will develop and test a comprehensive training program for city administrations based on typical sector coupling use cases relevant to the target group. In addition, a toolkit will be developed to enable a rapid assessment of the ecological and economic impacts as well as the investment requirements for implementation projects in the field of sector coupling and to serve as a decision support for municipal officials.

The project consortium will establish demonstration centers in four partner regions in Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Bulgaria. At these locations, demonstration plants will be purchased and put into operation especially for the CSSC Lab in order to illustrate various applications of sector coupling and make them accessible to interested regional parties. The activities of all demo centers will be virtually linked via the online platform of the CSSC Lab, so that the entire know-how gained in the course of the project will be available to interested municipalities and cities far beyond the project region. In order to ensure the long-term transfer of the project results into practice, the project partners will develop action plans for each of the project regions. Finally, strategic recommendations for the entire Danube region are summarized in a roadmap in order to provide future-oriented support to the municipalities in the regions in implementing sector coupling applications.