SPES CONSULTING SRL

Their core work

SPES Consulting is a Genova-based Italian SME specialising in energy and climate policy consulting for cities and local authorities. Their work focuses on helping municipalities align with EU energy and climate frameworks — notably the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) and the European Energy Award (EEA) — and synchronising these with related EU instruments such as SCIS-EIP, CEN-ISO standards, and Smart Specialisation Strategies. They also bring hands-on experience in smart city deployments, contributing to urban electric mobility and ICT platform development through large-scale Innovation Actions. In practice, they sit at the intersection of technical urban energy management and EU policy navigation.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first H2020 engagement (from 2016), SPES worked inside a large smart city Innovation Action — REPLICATE — contributing to electric mobility and ICT platform deployment with a strong focus on making urban solutions replicable across cities. By 2018 they took on a coordinator role in CoME EASY, a Coordination and Support Action whose entire purpose was aligning EU energy policy instruments for local governments. This shift from technical participant to policy coordinator signals a deliberate move toward the advisory and governance layer of the energy transition rather than the technology deployment layer.

SPES appears to be evolving from a smart city technical partner into a specialist EU energy policy consultancy focused on helping local authorities bridge between competing EU frameworks — a niche with growing demand as the European Green Deal adds more overlapping obligations for municipalities.

How they like to work

SPES has experience on both sides of the consortium table — as a participant in a large 55-partner Innovation Action and as coordinator of a smaller Coordination and Support Action. Their 55 unique partners across 10 countries, accumulated in just two projects, suggests they engage in broad, multi-country consortia rather than small bilateral collaborations. As coordinator, they likely played a facilitation and project management role rather than a purely technical one, which reflects a consultancy DNA.

SPES has built a surprisingly wide network for an SME with only two projects — 55 unique partners across 10 countries. This breadth is largely attributable to REPLICATE, which was a flagship Horizon 2020 smart city project with a diverse European consortium, and reflects SPES's ability to operate comfortably in large, multi-national project environments.

What sets them apart

SPES occupies a specific niche: they understand both the technical reality of smart city energy deployments and the policy machinery of EU energy governance instruments like the Covenant of Mayors and the European Energy Award. Few SMEs can credibly bridge these two worlds, making SPES a useful partner for consortia that need someone to translate technical project outputs into policy-relevant frameworks — or to help cities actually implement what the project produces. Their Genova base and Italian SME status also adds geographic and eligibility value for consortia seeking Southern European representation.

Highlights from their portfolio

• REPLICATE
  A flagship Horizon 2020 Innovation Action on smart city replication with the largest budget in SPES's portfolio (EUR 399,875), covering electric mobility and ICT platforms across multiple European lighthouse cities.
• CoME EASY
  SPES served as coordinator — their only lead role — on a Coordination and Support Action directly bridging the European Energy Award and the Covenant of Mayors, demonstrating policy coordination capacity beyond pure technical work.