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This HIGH Horizons report (deliverable 2.1) provides an overview of the 1st version of the environmental health database. In addition, it assesses database design to evaluate which approach would be the most beneficial given the data requirement of the HIGH Horizons project. Further, it presents the metadata of the variables with relevant sharing rules for both environment and health data available for the project.

The Horizon2020 project AURES II aims at ensuring the effective implementation of auctions for renewable energies in the EU Member States (MS). In recent years, auction schemes for the allocation of support for renewable electricity sources (RES) have been advancing rapidly across Europe. Auctions are considered to have brought down support levels and increased planning capability for RES deployment and state budgets. In some unfortunate cases, they have, however, also resulted in delayed or unrealised projects and increased uncertainty for project developers. A variety of auction designs are still being tested and introduced in EU MS, as well as foreseen by European legislation. Therefore, there is still a need for further assessment and improvement of national auction design and implementation to ensure the future success of RES auctions in Europe. Applying different qualitative and quantitative methods in the various work packages (WPs), the AURES II project partners have already drafted and published a large number of reports and studies. This article aims at comprehensively presenting these results and provide a first overview.

This HIGH Horizons report (deliverable 2.3) provides an overview of the environmental and health analysis that has taken place. This document builds on the work in deliverable 2.1. It provides an overview of data analysis for fifteen countries on a national, sub-national or local level, for common health outcomes of preterm birth and under-five mortality and climate exposure indicators. The aim of the analysis is to evaluate the impact of extreme heat on two health outcomes to investigate and provide insights on key thresholds and trends. In addition, an international perspective on these two health outcomes is offered. 

In this talk we present the preliminary results of the proof of concept (POC) stage of a drone-based wind lidar system development. For many years, the wind energy community has been in the quest for cost-effective alternatives to wind measurements from tall masts. A potential solution lays in the application of drones as platforms for wind lidars in which the drone would be used to position the lidar in vicinity of the measurement points and steer the outgoing laser beam. By doing this, the wind lidar can be significantly simplified leading to the overall cost reductions. To put on trial the proposed solution we have built a proof of concept (POC) drone-lidar system. The system consisted of a dual-telescope CW lidar system built by ZX Lidars, and off-the-shelf drone and gimbal system. The selected drone and gimbal system are typically used in the motion picture industry, while the lidar was optimized for wind tunnel measurements or for turbine blade mounting, thus the telescopes are separated from the rest of the lidar. For the POC we mounted only the telescopes to the gimbal which were placed orthogonal to each other (i.e., 90 degrees opening angle). The telescopes were connected to the lidar located on the ground using 100-m long optical fibers. To test the POC drone-lidar system we hovered the drone next to mast-mounted sonic anemometers at the Risø test center. The preliminary results of the intercomparison between the measurements derived from the POC system and one of the sonic anemometers show good agreement. The POC stage results confirmed that the drone-lidar systems could be a potential measurement solution that the community has been looking for.

The energy world is facing major challenges as fossil fuel generation is replaced with renewable generation, which is often characterised by variable behaviour. This increases the need for resources to be used to guarantee frequency stability, congestion management, voltage regulation and power quality. At the same time, an increasing number of flexible demand and storage systems is located at distribution level. These resources could potentially be available to provide network services if they are aggregated effectively. To achieve this, however, the roles of the diverse network stakeholders – transmission systems operators (TSOs), distribution systems operators (DSOs) and aggregators – should be reshaped. In tandem with this, the way real-time electricity markets are organised also needs to be adapted to reflect the new operating environment. The project SmartNet (smartnet-project.eu/) compares five different TSO-DSO interaction schemes and different real-time market architectures with the aim of finding out which one could deliver the best compromise between costs and benefits for the system. An ad-hoc-developed platform is used to carry out simulations on three benchmark countries – Italy, Denmark and Spain Conclusions are drawn on possible regulatory gaps both at European and national level. A Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is implemented to compare the costs needed to implement the five TSO-DSO coordination schemes (e.g. to improve the system ICT) with the benefits drawn by the system. In this way, the SmartNet project aims at answering the following key questions: how should real-time markets be optimally organised for enabling flexible generation and load to provide their contribution to system services? which interaction scheme between a TSO and a DSO would prove the most efficient one? What concrete economic benefits could the system draw from this? what is the trade-off between these benefits and the extra costs for ICT deployment to implement these new schemes? what regulatory impact could all of this have on the present European and national regulation? which technological solutions could make it possible to realise a seamless monitoring and control of distributed energy resources (DERs), typically located in distribution? The present paper summarizes the achievements of SmartNet during the first two project years. Main focus is on the set-up of the simulation platform and on the modelling of the different components (transmission and distribution networks, ancillary services markets, aggregation processes, system regulations). The main information related to the expected 2030 Italian scenario (which will be object of simulation and cost-benefit analysis assessment later in the project) will be provided together with some preliminary reflections on ICT constraints and regulatory implications.

The mobility of researchers in Europe is a key issue toward a better coordination andalignment of Research, Technology, and Development within the European Research Area (ERA). European interested parties, including research centres, universities and agencies underline the importance of an increased mobilization, starting from the university student level up to Managers. The Task Force (TF) setup by the European Research Alliance, EERA, Executive Committee, ExCo, in April 2016, received the mandate to deliver a recommended proposal for an operational student and researcher mobility scheme for EERA Joint Programmes members. This document reports the first study of the EERA TF. It presents the overview, analysis, and comparisons of existing research and industrial mobility programmes within the EU. This includes specific mobility programmes such as the Marie Skłodowska‐Curie Actions, Erasmus+, and mobility schemes ongoing in different EU funded projects within EERA members i.e. the Integrated Research Programme in Wind Energy IRPWind, and the European Liason on Electricity Committed Towards long‐term Research Activity Integrated Research Programme ELECTRA IRP, and the, Marine Renewables Infrastructure Network for Emerging Energy Technology, MaRINET2. A questionnaire has been created and distributed on Survey Monkey in order to gain direct knowledge of the mobility actions in different institutions. 76 scientists provided their feedback, allowing having an indication of the effectiveness of each mobility program in mobilizing scientists, their strength and weakness points, and how they can be improved. A major highlight is the unanimous appreciations of the mobility opportunities in providing a large International network and personal development; consequently, there is need of more funding to answer the demand.

Research Data Management in Engineering Interest Group of Research Data Alliance (RDA) Many instruments produce large volumes of data over extended periods, and it is essential to store data-sets reliably until they can be analyzed. However, differences between data-sets are often indiscernible until they are processed by engineers later tasked with analysis. Annotation of data-sets between acquisition and archival, plus recording subsequent processing contributions, significantly increases efficiency of selection and analysis by identifying key features in an accessible way. This reduces duplication of effort and improves discovery—which is essential for FAIR use. This project, which was a collaboration between The Department of Wind Energy, Technical University of Denmark, and Data Futures LBG, demonstrated annotation of turbulence data in the vicinity of wind turbines, which forms an important component of planning for investment in wind power generation.

We report on an experimental study of nanostructuring of silicon solar cells using reactive ion etching (RIE). A simple mask-less, scalable RIE nanostructuring of the solar cell surface is shown to reduce the AM1.5-weighted average reflectance to a level below 1 % in a fully optimized RIE texturing, and thus holds a significant potential for improvement of the cell performance compared to current industrial standards. The reflectance is shown to remain below that of conventional textured cells also at high angle of incidence. The process is shown to be equally applicable to mono-, multi- and quasi-mono-crystalline Si. The process was successfully integrated in fabrication of solar cells using only industry standard processes on a Czochralski (CZ) silicon starting material. The resulting cell performance was compared to cells with conventional texturing. For cells, where the nanostructuring was not fully optimized (reflectance larger than 2 %), an efficiency of 16.5 % at 1 sun was demonstrated. 28th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition; 2066-2068