By Freya Wise, Research Fellow
The annual EUSEW is the biggest conference dedicated to renewable and energy efficiency in Europe with over 60 parallel policy sessions over three days and more than 2,000 online and in person attendees each day including local and national policy makers, industry experts, researchers and academics.
This year it was held on the 10-12 of June and was probably the 4th or 5th year that I had attended. Sometimes doing research on carbon reduction can feel a bit disheartening. For example reading latest update suggesting that urgent action is needed in the next three years to have any chance of limiting warming to 1.5ºC [1] and yet this urgency seems far from international and domestic political agendas.
I like EUSEW because its focus on policy means that you hear about real actions that are being taken on local, national and regional levels in locations around Europe and I always go away feeling a bit more positive because there are lots of good things happening out there locally and indeed, at an EU level.
This year’s theme was ‘powering a fair and competitive green transition’ so there was a lot of discussion about the cost of electricity in Europe being higher than in other parts of the world. There was also a lot of talk about disadvantaged communities, what that looks like in different parts of Europe and not leaving anyone behind.
In this blog post I wanted to touch on some highlights of the sessions that I attended at this year’s EUSEW.
Highlight 1: Retrofit advice actually works!
One of the first sessions I attended explored policy tools, local initiative and financing models to encourage decarbonised housing and reduce energy poverty in European Cities. There were speakers from Belgium, Greece, Spain and the EU commission amongst others.
Two of the speakers were from the city of Ghent and spoke about a project where they provided free retrofit advice and one stop shop services* to any citizen in Ghent as part of their ‘Ghent, Climate City’ initiative [2]. Through part of a Horizon Europe funded project they were able to evaluate the effect of this advice and found that every €1 invested in providing the advice service led to €7 of actual retrofit work carried out. And this €7 was of course invested in local businesses, led to carbon reductions and had the potential to reduce fuel poverty.
Having recently written a paper on informational barriers to retrofit in the UK [3], I thought that this was a great statistic on the effectiveness of providing tailored, contextual and free advice to encourage retrofit.
A further presentation on the Thursday emphasised the need to take information to citizens and go to them to get their opinions and involvement rather than waiting for them to come to you. This was also something that we advocated in our recent paper and another speaker from Spain showed this great example of a mobile ‘one stop retrofit advice shop’ which was used to encourage fuel poor households to take up government supported retrofit and provides a good example of ‘taking advice to people’.
Highlight 2: ‘Talking to Ginger’ and actions not words
On Tuesday evening was what proved to be my favourite session of the conference, a keynote by Dr Kris de Meyer, a neuroscientist and director of the Climate Action Unit [4] at UCL, discussing how we, the ‘experts’ communicate climate change.
He first introduced a comic of a man explaining something to reasonably to his dog, Ginger, but what Ginger heard was: Ginger, blah, blah, blah, blah… Ginger! Blah blah, blah…’ because Ginger didn’t understand the man’s ‘jargon’. He then went on to say that different people also mean different things with the same words and further that we as people are very reluctant to acknowledge this and deeply feel that our interpretation is the most widely held one even in the face of evidence that it is not.
There were lots of other interesting points and the presentation itself was apparently based on a recent TED talk, How to get unstuck on climate action. The other point that stuck with me however was that he explained that in sustainability research there is generally an assumption that if we educate people about the importance of climate action, they will act. However (and linking back to the insight 1!), people learn about climate change and then want to take action but don’t know how to overcome barriers. Instead, he was explaining that neuroscience has shown that it is action, not knowledge that inspires further action, and that action also leads to agency i.e. knowing how to act.
So, instead of trying to change peoples’ beliefs and convincing them to care, then expecting them to act, we should instead help people to start taking action and this will:
- help to persuade them to care
- inspire them to take further actions
- help them develop their ability to act
I think that operationalising this concept in practice may be challenging but I can see the logic. When we want people to start a sport, we offer them the opportunity to try it, we don’t just talk about it. This feels harder to do with something like building retrofit but is still definitely worthy of consideration.
The only sad thing about this talk was that it wasn’t longer and that the questions weren’t online as the onsite organisers, speaker and participants went off for cocktails!
Highlight 3: Control is key and the solution is energy boxes
The third highlight came from two talks on the Thursday. The first was about balancing energy performance with indoor environmental quality and one of the speakers highlighted the importance of personal control in increasing indoor comfort and reducing energy use through three examples:
- Studies showed that offering options for individual control over lighting in office buildings paired with occupancy sensors reduced energy consumption compared with standard lighting practices and boosted visual comfort and productivity.
- The use of personal environmental control systems (PECS) such as heated chairs and foot warmers could maintain thermal comfort at ambient temperatures 3-4ºC higher or lower than those recommended by current standards, and reduce energy use by 15-60%
- Ceiling fans can create air movement which can make 28ºC temperatures feel like 25ºC while using <5% of the energy required by an air conditioning system used to achieve the same effect.
This was a nice summary of a range of literature that I’ve read in this field in the past and it was pleasing to know that simple solutions like this can have such positive effects.
Another presentation meanwhile talked about a living lab in Genk [5], Belgium, where they were experimenting with prefabricated façade retrofit of social housing to create positive energy districts. There were lots of interesting things about this project but I was particularly interested in the ‘plug and play’ energy boxes which contained a heat pump and hot water provision and other energy systems without having to alter internal systems in the house.
This is an interesting approach in itself as it is can help reduce some of the disruption barriers to heat pump uptake [6]. But what was particularly interesting was that because it was a living lab they were able to try having one combined technology box for 2-5 homes in a ‘microgrid’ and found that the price of the retrofit drops by 50% per dwelling at an optimum number of five dwellings in the grid. There are challenges with this approach around distributing the costs to the separate houses which still need more working through but it’s a very promising innovation.
Conclusion
Of course, not all of the sessions are about retrofit, there are also sessions on transport and industrial decarbonisation as well as policy developments, financing and grid infrastructure so there really is a lot of interest going on. EUSEW is over for this year now, although recordings of the presentations are still available on the platform if you’ve registered.
The next EUSEW will be in June 2026, registrations open around January and online attendance is free. I can heartily recommend attendance if you are interested in sustainability activities across Europe and would like to go away with a bit of positivity that good things are happening!
Author: Dr Freya Wise, ESRC Research Fellow (UWE Bristol)
* One stops shops offer retrofit information, building specific plans for retrofit and offering support with sourcing finance and tradespeople, and often have a service to project manage the retrofit process for households and to conduct quality checks after the work has been completed. They are have been written into the recent recast of the EU’s Energy and Buildings Directive as something that all EU governments should implement
Reference list
[1] Forster PM, Smith C, Walsh T, Lamb WF, Lamboll R, Cassou C, et al. Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence. Earth System Science Data 2025;17:2641–80. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-2641-2025.
[2] Ghent’s climate actions | Stad Gent 2025. https://stad.gent/en/city-governance-organisation/city-policy/ghents-climate-actions (accessed June 25, 2025).
[3] Wise F, Gillich A, Palmer P. Retrofit information challenges and potential solutions: Perspectives of households, retrofit professionals and local policy makers in the United Kingdom. Energy Research & Social Science 2025;119:103866. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103866 .
[4] UCL. UCL Climate Action Unit. Climate Action Unit 2021. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/climate-action-unit (accessed June 25, 2025).
[5] oPEN Lab – Leading the Transition to Positive Energy Neighbourhoods. EnergyVille n.d. https://energyville.be/en/project/open-lab-leading-the-transition-to-positive-energy-neighbourhoods/ (accessed June 25, 2025).
[6] Wise F, Cooper A, Eckert C. A Transdisciplinary Engineering and Systems Approach for Decarbonizing UK Home Heating. Engineering For Social Change, vol. 60, Online: IOS Press; 2024, p. 359–68. https://doi.org/10.3233/ATDE240880.