Energy Smart Communities Initiative (ESCI) was launched in 2010 APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting and funded by Chinese Taipei in 2011. One of the components of ESCI is the Knowledge Sharing Platform (KSP), a tool for collecting and sharing best practices for creating energy smart communities and the ESCI Best Practice Awards’ selection was entrusted to the University of Pennsylvania. At present, the wards are the only awards for projects within APEC and have been held every two years, which is APEC's highest certification awards for projects in the Asia-Pacific region that meet the criteria for a "smart energy community". ESCI covers four main pillars—Smart Transport, Smart Buildings, Smart Grids, and Smart Jobs and Consumers—along with the cross-cutting examples of Low Carbon Model Towns including case studies, policy briefs, research findings and research data.

In order to tell the "China’s story" and promote Chinese technology and experience, APSEC takes various measures. In 2015, APSEC established a strategic partnership with APEC ESCI Jury Team, participated in and undertook scoring and carried our relevant trainings on APEC ESCI.

In 2017-2019, APSEC organized trainings on ESCI Best Practices Awards for five times, produced 2 series of training materials, more than 110 trainees from 21 economies attended the trainings, 14 projects from China were collected for ESCI competition, the first international training base, the " State Grid Customer Service Center", was established.