The 7th partners meeting and steering committee of the SUPPORT interregional project was held online November 4,2020. After the first greetings, the Lead Partner illustrated the current state of the initiative and planned the activities to be carried out in the next semester before the final conference and Project closure. CMRC reported on the communication activities of the 6th semester and for the next semester will prepare a monthly schedule for website article publishing. Then the Partners reported on the monitoring of action plans implementation in last 6 months.
The Covid pandemic obviously has had a profound impact also on the implementation of the SUPPORT Action Plans. However from the report of the partners it became evident that the activities do go on, and the main effect of the sanitary crisis is to slow down and in some cases to modify the original design. The Save@work project for example, introduced by the Energy Agency for Southeast Sweden and taken up in the Action Plan of IRENA is based on the quantitative and competitive comparison between energy performance in public offices in the preceding and the ongoing year. With schools and offices closed a comparison between 2019 and 2020 doesn’t make sense and therefore the implementation of the action plan had to switch to qualitative indicators. 
The installation of curtains in public schools to cut down on the energy consumption for cooling in the summer is one of those actions to be taken up in the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans of the cities doing a Joint SECAP. The implementation of the German action plan, on the other hand, which foresees extensive monitoring of energy consumption taking up the ENERGO experience of the Romanian partner ALEA does continue as foreseen, but has been slowed down by the virus. Smart working, which has been practiced by the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital already before, has become of vital interest with the pandemic. For the goal of SUPPORT to improve energy efficiency in public buildings, the energy saving effects of smart working are at the centre of attention, with the methodological challenge on how to quantify them.
The final conference that will be held in February 2021 online, will be the occasion to tackle the methodological problems that in part are connected to the Covid crisis, in part are inherent in the field of action of SUPPORT and to discuss in more depth the actions implemented, the results they obtained and their impact on the policy instruments of the partners.
