The optimisation of distributed and renewable energy systems in buildings has shown that zero energy systems, using existing technologies, is within reach in the household sector where the thermal and the systems can support each other to increase renewable energy harvesting, co-generation and waste heat recovery. Smart and sustainable systems can be deployed rapidly using solar collectors, heat pumps, energy storages and smart power grid driven by a Smart Energy Management strategy (SEM), based on Model Predictive Control (MPC). Targeting energy autonomous systems will indeed require a step further in the development of the infrastructure. In line with the design of future 100% renewable energy systems and autonomous cities, advanced concepts of multi-service energy systems have been proposed. These concepts of multi-carrier, multi-services and multi-grids systems (electricity, gas, heat distribution and mobility) are built around a "smart thermal grid" connecting buildings, centralised plants and distributed heating and cooling producing units, including individual contributions from the connected buildings and Power to Gas storage (P2G). It has been demonstrated that reasonable investments in advanced heat distribution system could lead to substantial benefits for both the economy and individual consumers, with a break-even time shorter than 6 year.