SENSE contributes to Austria’s sustainability goals by making complex systems that underlie key (and often highly polluting) infrastructures more efficient and user-friendly through explanations of (anomalous) events occurring in those systems. We aim to reduce green-house gas emissions by at least 15% through system explainability in smart grid/building use cases by relying on the following three innovations. First, scientific innovation focuses on developing cutting-edge technologies for explaining anomalies occurring in complex cyber-physical system (CPS) infrastructures through standard-based Digital Twin architectures and semantics based explainability methods combined into a robust technology stack. Thus we will strengthen Austria’s technical sovereignty in technologies for managing complex systems. Second, application domain level innovation consists in embedding the developed technologies into large-scale, realistic testbeds from Austria’s largest living lab through a number of proof-of-concepts with high exploitation potential. Third, the previous two innovations enable SENSE to pioneer work on understanding the sustainability effects of system explainability through user-based studies and economic evaluation methods.