ASCEND, together with its sister PCED projects, is organizing a webinar during European Sustainable Energy Week 2026 titled “Why Positive Clean Energy Districts Matter: Building Europe’s Clean Energy Future.”
Taking place on 11 June 2026, from 14:00 to 15:30, the joint webinar will explore how digitally enabled Positive Clean Energy Districts can move from demonstration to scale through stronger governance, improved investment readiness, and effective replication models.
Cities account for 70–80% of EU energy use, improving their energy resilience is crucial for the success of the Energy Union. PCEDs are increasingly recognised as a practical mechanism for implementing the EU energy and climate policy at local level. By integrating renewable energy, energy efficiency, digital twins, mobility solutions and citizen engagement, PCEDs offer a concrete tool to operationalise objectives set out in Agenda 2030. However, most PCEDs are still pilots, with insufficient scalability and weak business models or further investment.
This session positions PCEDs as a policy and delivery tool for scaling clean energy solutions, enabled by digitalisation. It highlights how digital twins and integrated decision-making allow cities to design, test and optimise PCEDs before implementation, assess impacts on energy security and affordability, align city choices with EU-level targets. By reducing uncertainty and improving comparability, digital tools strengthen governance capacity and support faster, evidence-based decisions.
Digitally enabled PCEDs can move from individual pilots to replicable portfolios across city alliance networks. NEUTRALPATH supports cities and networks in defining climate-neutral pathways through data-driven planning and participatory processes, while ASCEND focuses on structuring PCEDs that are scalable, investable and transferable across different urban contexts. ExPEDite illustrates how digitally designed and policy-aligned PEDs are delivered faster by addressing regulatory, organisational and financial bottlenecks at city level.
Through concrete city experiences and interactive discussion, the session explores how scaling clean energy solutions requires both robust digital decision-support and targeted acceleration mechanisms, how cities can implement PCEDs to accelerate scaling, reduce risk, attract investment and contribute to a clean, secure, resilient and competitive Energy Union.
The joint webinar will feature the following participating projects:
- ASCEND
- BIPED
- ExPEDite
- NEUTRALPATH
- TIPS4PED
We kindly invite you to register for the webinar via this link.
