Maguy Soldevila is a former art teacher. Some years ago, she quit the frenzy and the pollution of the French city of Lyon to move into a typical house of the 1960s, in the small village of Sail-sous-Couzan.

María Regidor co-owns a mini-hydro power plant in Spain, which produces part of the electricity provided to the residents of the Castile and León region.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms allow energy sharing and trading within a community without the binding mediation of the traditional big utilities.

It's a brand new sector: the first steps date back to 2012. Today energy crowdfunding is a way of financing solar panel or wind turbine projects.

The European construction industry and home-builder citizens are increasingly aware of sustainable choices. Some solutions can be more expensive than others, although sometimes this only concerns the construction phase.

Cities have started to join forces to become more energy efficient . This trends stems from the findings of the first climate assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 1990, which was quite alarming.

There is much need to develop energy efficient solutions for residential buildings in Europe. The EU-funded project, MeeFS , due to be completed by the end of 2015, is developing an innovative multifunctional and energy efficient façade system to retrofit residential buildings.

Innovative solutions are required to improve the energy efficiency of the existing residential building stock in Europe. But combining such innovation with better management and new business models creates unique retrofitting opportunities .

The heating and cooling of buildings take a large share in the energy consumption in Europe . The average energy consumption in the non-residential sector, such as public and industrial buildings, is estimated to be at least 40% greater than in the residential sector.