Our paper is informed by the recent interest in how the sharing economy and related initiatives mayact as drivers for energy transition and increase well-being and social sustainability in smart sustainable city contexts. We take the example of temporary buildings that for a limited time period offer shared public spaces for public events in the city. Such initiatives are often linked to quadruple helix initiatives in which a local city council, industry and academia join forces to engage citizens in the energy and climate debate, with a temporary building structure as the focal point. The paper argues that such energy initiatives are valuable in terms of social sustainability since they create additional public space for the benefit of citizen debate; contribute scalable solutions and effective infrastructure that can promote energy awareness among citizens. However, there is limited scientific evidence, and a lacking awareness, of the energy efficiency and climate comfort relating to temporary buildings for public use. Our preliminary results show that such factors risk to obscure the well-intended objectives of quadruple helix initiatives to support energy transition. The revealed problems of a Stockholm use case suggest that in spite of significant social and economic impact resulting from curated public events which attracted an unprecedented number of visitors, energy consumption, climate comfort and indoor air quality are nevertheless important factors that also must be considered in the design and implementation of temporary building structures. The paper concludes that better climate controlshared economy thinking is necessary at theearliest stage of a planning process, for temporary buildings to be successful.