On 19 and 20 November 2025, Aalborg’s House of Music hosted the ESPON Seminar “Making Space for the Renewable Energy Transition”, opened by Connie Hedegaard, former EU Commissioner for Climate Action, addressing a question directly relevant to iDesignRES‘s own regional case studies: where to physically put the infrastructure the energy transition requires.

Plenary debates brought in voices from the European Committee of the Regions, Aalborg University (one of iDesignRES’s 22 consortium partners), and the European Environmental Bureau to discuss how the green transition can strengthen rather than undermine territorial cohesion.

Henrik Lund contributed a session, “Academic insights from modelling and Danish experience,” to 200 to 300 attendees. An interactive World Café hosted by the ESPON MAK-RES project explored land-use conflicts between renewables, agriculture, and housing, a tension affecting most of EU territory. Lund’s Danish case studies gave concrete validation for the kind of spatial trade-offs iDesignRES is now scaling up across its own North Sea and South-East Europe macro-region cases.