Scaling-Up the involvement of women in supporting and accelerating market uptake of renewable energy sources for heating and cooling
Women hold great potential as agents of change, driving the clean energy transition and getting us closer to meeting the EU’s climate and energy targets for 2030. W4RES taps into this potential to support the uptake of renewable energy in heating and cooling (RHC), a market that urgently needs to shift more to RES. We start with a deep dive into framework conditions and regional specificities of 8 diverse yet representative markets in Europe, assessing enablers and barriers to RHC uptake. Building on gender-disaggregated insights from market actors and stakeholders as well as successful cases of women leading RHC projects, we develop a suite of flexible and cost-effective support measures with high reapplication potential. We then deploy our measures on the field offering technical and business support to cut down project development timings and efforts as well as to sidestep legal, institutional and financial challenges, setting in motion feasible and sustainable business models fit to market. In parallel, we empower decision-makers to leverage a gender perspective into their projects and policies to improve acceptance, while raising awareness to foster demand for RHC. Along the way, a gender-responsive monitoring and evaluation framework will gauge the performance and impact of our measures, providing us with the intel required to turn them from solutions fit for a set of local challenges to integrated solutions that can address diverse policy and market needs across Europe. We use this intel as a catalyst to foster co-creation, mutual learning and international cooperation for frameworks more conducive to RHC uptake at local, regional national and EU level, based on cost-effective support schemes and lower financing costs for RHC facilities. In the process, we coordinate our actions with relevant initiatives and offer tools to facilitate the reapplication of our results, ensuring their long-term sustainability as viable solutions to supporting RHC uptake.