BECoop Information Sheet
and Informed Consent Form

1. BECoop Introduction

We would like to invite you to take part in an activity being carried out by BECoop, a 3-year project funded by the European Union within the framework of the H2020 Research and Innovation programme. Before you decide to take part in our project’s activity, please take some time to carefully read this information sheet and ask questions about anything you do not understand.

1. What is the BECoop project all about?

Over the last years, the EU has witnessed some remarkable steps in Renewable Energy (RE) deployment. However, at the same time, we see an increasingly uneven penetration of RE across the different energy sectors, with the heating and cooling sector lagging behind. Community bioenergy schemes can play a catalytic role in the market uptake of bioenergy heating technologies and can strongly support the increase of renewables penetration in the heating and cooling sector, contributing to the EU target for increasing renewable heat within this next decade. However, compared to other RES, bioenergy has a remarkably slower development pace in the decentralised energy production which is a model that is set to play a crucial role in the future of the energy transition in the EU.

The ambition of the EU-funded BECoop project is to provide the necessary conditions and technical as well as business support tools for unlocking the underlying market potential of community bioenergy. The project’s goal is to make community bioenergy projects more appealing to potential interested actors and to foster new partnerships among the international bioenergy community.

BECoop employs a market research process with qualitative and quantitative methods to offer a clear understanding of the dynamic community bioenergy heating landscape at regional, national and EU level. The project specifies the community bioenergy market uptake drivers and barriers and further empowers policy makers to introduce enabling frameworks for community bioenergy. BECoop will equip administrative authorities with support schemes (replication guidelines, networking with more advanced regions, self-assessment tools, evidence from real practice) and capacity building to surpass technical and legal challenges and promote new forms of people-powered energy system governance.

Aiming to facilitate the deployment of bioenergy heating technologies and build trust in community energy, 4 pilot cases will be deployed across Europe (Spain, Greece, Poland, Italy), showcasing the BECoop concept. These cases represent diverse framework conditions, community bioenergy maturity, renewables penetration in the heating/cooling market and socioeconomic environments, thus, providing a highly complementary synthesis of evidence. This approach has a very high replication potential since it studies the most prominent community bioenergy heating development scenarios.

Α lot of different activities will take place within BECoop. Workshops, online surveys, interviews, warm-up, and training events will be organised aiming to unlock key social beliefs that favour or hinder bioenergy uptake and identify success cases across Europe. On top of these, the project will ignite a policy debate at a local and EU level, through policy workshops, aiming to streamline the BECoop policy recommendations to the actual support needs of policy makers.

2. Useful Information

You have been invited to take part in a BECoop project activity because you have been identified as a key stakeholder.

1. Is my participation in the project’s activity voluntary?

2. What will my involvement require?

Your participation is entirely voluntary. If you decide to participate in a BECoop activity, we will ask you to sign a BECoop Informed Consent Form (provided in the next section) to collect and process your data. The project will last for 36 months but your involvement would only be for as long as you wish.

3. What we need from you – Purpose of data collection

We would like to learn more about your perceptions and beliefs around bioenergy community heating. Your contribution and feedback will help us to organise a Network of Interest (NoI) and Expert Panels and be involved in:

• Project Validation activities that will be done through the thematic group panels as key elements for the design, development and implementation of community bioenergy heating projects. The panels will leverage their expertise to validate BECoop actions, provide mentoring to our RESCoops and replication cases, fostering their vision for achieving the 2050 decarbonisation goals
• Networking activities by participating in matchmaking event for matchmaking seeking funding or collaboration
• Mentoring activities that will include participation in a peer-to-peer mentoring program Experts participating in community energy projects will engage in peer learning activities and matched with developing RESCoops. These include sharing information and experience through online meetings, work shadowing and study tours.
• BECoop dissemination activities

To effectively conduct this, we need to process some of your personal data:

• Your contact details;
• Some basic demographics (age, gender);
• Your professional info (organisation, job position, field of expertise);
• Your opinions on the subject matter.

4. What will we do with your data?

The information you provide will be confidential. Your consent form will be kept separate from the observations collected during the course of the project activity. We will share your data with a few other BECoop project partners that are involved in the data analysis and reporting process. Once the data is analysed, a report of the findings may be submitted for publication. The project’s deliverables that will be derived by this activity will not include your personal data or any other information that could identify you. The results of this project activity may be also shared with European Union representatives (e.g., the Project Officer evaluating the project’s progress, auditing EU agencies). Only broad trends will be reported, and it will not be possible to identify any individuals.

Detailed information on how BECoop project handles data is provided at the BECoop Privacy Policy document that was shared with you.

5. Are there any risks involved?

No risks are involved.

6. Access, deletion of information or consent withdrawal

According to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you have the right to ask us to: (i) give you a copy of your data, (ii) correct your data, if you think they are not accurate, (iii) erase your data, (iv) limit or stop processing applied to your data, or (v) give you your data in an appropriate format and to transfer them to another organisation. You may also withdraw your consent and, therefore, your participation at any time without consequences. Anonymous data already collected will be used because we cannot trace the information back to you. No further data would be collected, or any other procedure would be carried out in relation to your information.

In case you wish to verify the personal data that we store, have it modified, corrected, deleted or request a consent withdrawal, you may communicate with the responsible partner listed below and ask a copy of the BECoop Data Subject Request Form. Please fill in the form, explicitly describing your request, and forward it back to the partner conducting the project activity.

7. Whom do I contact if there is a need to?

3. BECoop Informed Consent Form

By clicking the ‘CREATE ACCOUNT’ button, you are getting registered automatically to the forum

Website: www.becoop-project.eu
E-mail: konstas@qplan-intl.gr, dasopoulos@qplan-intl.gr
Twitter: @BECoopH2020
Facebook: /BECoop-H2020
LinkedIn: /BECoop-H2020

The ambition of BECoop is to provide the necessary conditions and technical as well as business support tools for unlocking the underlying market potential of community bioenergy, fostering new links and partnerships.

The project BECoop has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952930. The sole responsibility for the content of this website lies with the authors. It does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union. Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission is responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.