DESTRESS has started. On Monday, 7th March 2016, the kick-off meeting took place in Utrecht/ in the Netherlands. The partners gathered to get to know each other, their institutions/sites and their work personally and to discuss the focus, roles and responsibilities within individual work packages. A joint vision of the project, its intentions and expected results was established and the timetable was succesfully fine-tunned. The internal project meeting was embeded in the Joint Geothermal Meeting with representatives from the European Commission in order to learn about other European projects in the field of geothermal energy and to make DESTRESS visible to other geothermal communities.