Current smart house/energy technologies treat home and working environments as effectively consisting of isolated and passive individual units. This severely limits achieved energy efficiency, as it ignores the potential delivered by homes, offices, and commercial buildings seen as intelligent networked collaborations. Thus, the SmartHouse/SmartGrid project introduces a holistic concept for smart houses situated and intelligently managed within their broader environment. It develops intelligent networked ICT technology for collaborative technical-commercial aggregations of Smart Houses able to communicate, interact and negotiate with both customers and energy devices in the local energy grid so as to achieve maximum overall energy efficiency as a whole. Our technology is built on (i) using available open industry standards in both the ICT and energy sectors; (ii) employing communication and computing capabilities that are already in widespread use in mainstream home and working environments. The SmartHouse/SmartGrid technology will be field tested in three different countries. On this basis, the project will define a roadmap to mass application. Only by considering the aggregated network level of smart houses managed by intelligent networked ICT for scale and flexibility, one is able to achieve the quantum leap in energy efficiency and sustainability that the EU's "20% by 2020" objectives call for.