Enhancing scientific capacity for energy poverty (ENPOWER)

Today over 41 million EU citizens are unable to access essential energy services and suffered from energy poverty. This led the European Commission (EC) to consider energy poverty a major societal challenge. In Bosnia and Herzegovina around 70-15% of households are found to be energy poor. It is well recognized that solving of energy poverty problem can have multiple benefits on health, air quality, comfort, and well-being, and improved household budgets, boosting economic growth and prosperity in the region. Solutions for energy poverty are related to the search for energy efficiency, which calls for long-term sector specific interventions, focusing on several causes of energy vulnerability and affecting other policy areas, such as energy justice, social, health, economy, CO2 emissions reductions, and other macroeconomic areas. Solving this problem in any country demands close cooperation among different sectors: research, technology, policy, law, innovation, sociology, and economy. That is why solutions for eliminating energy poverty require an innovative, interdisciplinary, and structural approach with strong cooperation across countries and across sectors. NPOWER will lead the transformative change in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) to strengthen the scientific reputation, attractiveness and networking channels of the University of Banja Luka (UNIBL) through supporting its innovation and research excellence in energy poverty and justice energy, sustainable buildings, energy efficiency, smart energy, human capital development, and application of innovative approaches, co-creative solution finding with business and policy makers, as well as in involvement of different ecosystems of innovation through the newly formed Building Advisory System Living Lab (BAS-Lab), which will be developed through cooperation with distinguished EU partners with established scientific excellence.