Pioneer cities have demonstrated a willingness and capability to decarbonise local heat systems, but support is needed to scale up action. Heat decarbonisation is not simply a technical challenge, but also a political and social one; stakeholders must inform decisions about appropriate technological and policy solutions and will, in turn, be affected by them. Taking three dimensions of stakeholders, technology, and policy, a structured approach which centres stakeholders is presented to help local government to collaboratively find appropriate technology and policy solutions, both at the strategic scale across the municipality and in localised pilot projects, and explores how to initialise and support heat decarbonisation in more cities.

The Triple-A project aimed to install demonstration exemplars of a variety of low-carbon technologies to increase awareness and adoption of these (building/construction) technologies by homeowners. Through this, the adoption of low-carbon technologies became normalised and created ambassadors for the technologies who can influence other homeowners. This document aims to outline the process used to implement these demonstration homes and provides examples and guidance from the experience of the project partners.
The demonstration exemplars implemented ranged in their approaches but were grouped into four different types:
• Model A: Utilising new and innovative technologies.
• Model B: Whole house or nearly-zero carbon retrofit.
• Model C: Large scale or community wide mass retrofit.
• Model D: Longer term phased retrofit.
These models were explored using a structured approach, taking into account various aspects. These stages are discussed in more detail throughout this document, which includes the lessons learnt at each stage:
 Identifying suitable target areas in 8 local authority regions for single-family home renovations
 Exploring citizen segments in target areas and related engagement opportunities
 Identifying suitable financial incentives for engaging single-family homeowners
 Testing installation of technologies through demonstration homes
 Evaluating CO2 reduction of demo exemplars and awareness raising

SHIFFT is an Interreg 2 Seas project, running from 2019-2022, promoting cross-border cooperation between 4 European countries: The Netherlands, France, Belgium and The United Kingdom. It has been approved under the priority ‘Low Carbon Technologies’.