• Energy Research
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• 2019 close

The Energy Data Innovation Network (EDI-Net) will use smart energy and water meter data to accelerate the implementation of sustainable energy policy. It will do this by increasing the capacity of EU public authorities to act quickly and decisively. The capacity will be increased by the provision of just the right amount of intelligible information, by training and exchange of experiences of Public authorities and by provision of tools and support to implement and monitor their sustainable energy plans. To move beyond the traditional technical energy manager approach to use the information to engage with decision makers, finance mangers and building users. To make energy more “visible”. To make energy and water date “more exciting” to buildings users. Innovation in terms of using big data analytics to address issues at scale. Big data; thousands of EU public buildings; information for decision makers, finance managers and building users; benchmarking of EU public buildings; and monitoring implementation of Sustainable Energy Action Plans or local Climate Protection Plans. The core of EDI-NET is the analysis of smart meter data from buildings, from renewable energy systems and from building energy management systems (BEMS) using Big Data analytics technologies. The attractive fruit around this core is an online forum to spread knowledge and facilitate exchange of experience and best practice through peer to peer education in a friendly and useful way. The tree that supports and ripens the fruit is the existing European network of Climate Alliance that builds the capacity of EU public authorities to more effectively implement sustainable energy policies. We recognise the smart meter data, by themselves, will not implement sustainable energy policy. However, when combined with on-line discussion forum, local campaigns, awareness raising and peer to peer knowledge transfer it can achieve savings of between 5 and 15 percent; at least 16 GWh/yr, worth over 1.5 M€.

Considerable challenges remain today regarding Europe´s transition towards a decarbonised energy system that meets the economic and social needs of its citizens. Rebound effects, that is, a full or partial cancelling-out of efficiency gains over time through increased overall energy use, highlight the centrality of consumption in multi-scalar decarbonisation efforts, urgently requiring attention from scientists and policy makers. Calls also abound for innovative, research-led programmes to enhance the social acceptability of energy transition initiatives and technologies. Understanding how culture-specific views and practices and energy policy and governance both shape and reflect individual and collective energy choices is of paramount importance for the success of the Energy Union. ENERGISE responds directly to these challenges by engaging in frontier energy consumption scholarship. Recognising the persistence of diverse energy cultures, both within and between countries, ENERGISE offers an ambitious social science programme to enhance understanding of changes in energy consumption practices across 30 European countries. Moving beyond state-of-the-art research, ENERGISE theoretically frames and empirically investigates socio-economic, cultural, political and gender aspects of the energy transition. It also examines how routines and ruptures (re)shape household energy consumption practices. Adopting a cutting-edge Living Labs approach, designed specifically to facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, ENERGISE fuses tools for changing individual- and community-level energy consumption with a novel method for energy sustainability assessment. ENERGISE will open new research horizons and greatly enhance Europe’s capacity for high-impact, gender-sensitive consumption research. It also offers timely support for public- and private-sector decision-makers who grapple with the design and implementation of measures to effectively reduce household energy consumption.

POWDERBLADE aims to gain market acceptance and rapid market take up of an innovative materials technology involving carbon/glass fibres in powder epoxy to be commercialised initially in the production of larger wind turbine blades (60 metre +). The immediate impact of this disruptive materials technology in the wind energy sector will be reduced wind turbine cost (-20%). This in turn will lead to increased productivity of low-carbon energy from more rapid market deployment of large turbines. The reduction in costs and increase in productivity will reduce the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) for the European citizen – the ultimate beneficiary of this innovation. This ambitious project is led by Éire Composites, an established industry player in composites manufacturing for the Aerospace and Renewable sectors and an experienced FP7/Horizon 2020 participant.In the year after project end, ÉireComposites will generate over €7m in revenue from direct sales of larger blade components using the new materials, increasing to €39m by 2021. The longer term commercial strategy is to focus on recurring revenues from the supply of advanced materials directly to manufacturers to produce blades and other products under license. This revenue stream will generate €60m by 2021. ÉireComposites will employ an additional 78 staff in direct production at project end increasing to 489 employees over both revenue streams three years later. Suzlon, a large wind OEM and end user, is the second industry partner. Their involvement demonstrates early market acceptance of the new technology. Suzlon are committed to investing substantial funds in the commercialisation of this technology in return for the opportunity to gain significantly as the first large industry player to market with light, cost-effective carbon-glass hybrid blades. Technology partner (University of Edinburgh) and innovation specialists (WestBIC) will support the industry partners in achieving the goals of POWDERBLADE.

In Europe, there is a clear long-term objective to decarbonize the energy system, but it is very unclear how this will be achieved in the heating and cooling sector. As a result, there is currently a lot of uncertainty among policymakers and investors in the heating and cooling sector, primarily due to a lack of knowledge about the long-term changes that will occur in the coming decades. This HRE proposal will enable new policies as well as prepare the ground for new investments by creating more certainty in relation to the changes that are required. The work in this proposal will build on three previous HRE studies, all of which have been successfully completed on time and all of which have already influenced high-level policymakers at EU and national level in Europe. The work from these previous studies will be significantly improved in this project. The new knowledge in this project will: - Improve at least 15 new policies at local, national, or EU level, - Specify how up to 3,000,000 GWh/year of fossil fuels can be saved in Europe, and - Quantify how the €3 trillion of investment required to implement these savings will reduce the net cost of heating and cooling in Europe. Furthermore, one of the most significant improvements compared to previous studies is the dissemination and communication strategy that has been developed as part of this proposal. These activities represent the largest work package in this proposal, which is necessary to ensure that policymakers, investors, and researchers at local, national, and EU level are all aware of the new data, tools, methodologies, and results from this project. The dissemination activities are expected to directly build the skills and capacity of at least 350 people in specific target groups identified by the consortium, while the communication activities will inform at least 50,000 people about the project activities and results.

Wind power plays a crucial role in Europe’s strategy towards a zero-carbon, clean energy-powered economy. While efforts have primarily focused on the development of wind turbine technology, it starts to become evident that the planning associated with the end-of-service life of these installations has been vastly neglected. Wind turbine blades are a particularly challenging component due to their composition and sheer size, which causes uncertainty about how to get rid of them in an environmentally and economically sustainable manner. Frandsen Industri (FI) will tackle this problem through prototyping and testing a mobile separation platform, which shred and separate the blades directly on the wind farms, and have its functionalities and performance documented and validated. This mobile separation platform will meet the need of the wind farm owners and the wind farm manufacturers by solving the existing problems related to decommissioning wind turbine blades, as it will: • Reduce the transportation costs by 16x • Reduce the CO2-emissions by 16x • Enable the wind farm owners to recover the scrap value of €50/ton of their expired blades. As up to 250,000 tons of expired wind turbine blades are to be decommissioned per year in our targeted markets in the 2020-2030 period, the business opportunity amounts to €29M/year. The total CO2-emissions for transporting EOSLWTs blades per year using the current method is 1,540,000 kg. Using our mobile separation platform, the CO2-emissions for transporting EOSLWTs blades will be reduced by a factor of 16x, to 96,250 kg per year. We at FI want to continue our award-winning technological development of solutions within the sphere of decommissioning expired raw materials. The EcoBlade project is a vital part in this, as it allows us to strive for a leadership position in the future market of blade disposal, expecting a cumulated profit of over €10 million in year 5 post project.

SHAPE-ENERGY “Social Sciences and Humanities for Advancing Policy in European Energy” will develop Europe’s expertise in using and applying energy-SSH to accelerate the delivery of Europe’s Energy Union Strategy. Our consortium brings together 7 leading academic partners and 6 highly respected policy, industry and communications practitioners from across the Energy, Social Sciences and Humanities (energy-SSH) research field, to create an innovative and inclusive Platform. Our partners are involved in numerous European energy projects, have extensive, relevant networks in the energy domain, and represent exceptional coverage across SSH disciplines across Europe. These enable us to maximise the impact of our Platform delivery within an intensive 2-year project. SHAPE-ENERGY brings together those who ‘demand’ energy-SSH research and those who ‘supply’ that research to collaborate in ‘shaping’ Europe’s energy future. A key deliverable will be a “2020-2030 research and innovation agenda” to underpin post-Horizon 2020 energy-focused work programmes. It will highlight how energy-SSH can be better embedded into energy policymaking, innovation and research in the next decade. Our SHAPE-ENERGY Platform activities will involve >12,114 stakeholders and begin with scoping activities including: an academic workshop, call for evidence, interviews with business leaders and NGOs, online citizen debates and multi-level policy meetings. We will build on our scoping to then deliver: 18 multi-stakeholder workshops in cities across Europe, an Early Stage Researcher programme, Horizon 2020 sandpits, interdisciplinary think pieces, a research design challenge, and a pan-European conference. Our expert consortium will bring their considerable expertise to overcome difficulties in promoting interdisciplinary and cross-sector working, and reach out to new parts of Europe to create an inclusive, dynamic and open Platform. SHAPE-ENERGY will drive forward Europe’s low carbon energy future.

Dirt on solar panels causes losses of more than €40bn p.a. and over 100Mtonnes of CO2 emission. Cleaning is expensive (up to €100/m2 depending on accessibility) and wastes water. Current self-cleaning coatings suffer from short lifetime (2-3 years), poor transparency, and high cost (over €20/m2). They are usually not cost-effective, are not widely used, and losses are accepted as part of the operation of the plant. The objective of this action is to bring to market a new product, SolarSharc, which will provide, for the first time, a transparent, durable, cost-effective and permanent self-cleaning solution for solar panels. This patented coating technology uses multi-functionalised silica nano-particles bonded strongly to the coating polymer matrix to provide a highly transparent, low cost, durable and robust self-cleaning coating. Target markets are utility scale solar and the rapidly growing (18% CAGR €26bn by 2022) Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) markets. The objectives of this 24 month action are to commercialise the SolarSharc coating and new self-cleaning BIPV modules from the current TRL6 prototype to operational demonstration (TRL9) in BIPV, certification, commercialisation and supply chain measures to deliver rapid growth. The action will be delivered by a consortium of SMEs (Opus, Onyx, Millidyne) representing the supply chain from materials to application together with specialist coatings technologists from London South Bank University and solar testing expertise from CEA. We are requesting a grant of €2.78m to bring SolarSharc to market, securing €2m of post-action financing for sales growth. Commercialisation of SolarSharc will develop new revenues for the consortium of €71m with profits of €45m cumulative over 5 years of sales, creating 243 new jobs within the consortium and providing a return on EU investment in this action of 19:1. These sales will increase output from new solar installation by 9000GWh, saving 5Mtonne of CO2 emission.

The transition to a low carbon economy needs to achieve multiple aims: competitiveness, protection of the environment, creation of quality jobs, and social welfare. Thus policy-makers and other key stakeholders require tools that need to focus beyond the energy sector by including these other domains of economy, society and the environment. Currently, most available tools lack integration of these important areas despite being tightly connected to the energy sector. Moreover, current energy modelling tools often lack documentation, transparency and have been developed for a specialized insider audience, which makes validation and comparison of results as well as independent review impossible. Our project aims to solve the current needs of integration and transparency by developing a leading-edge policy modelling tool based on WoLiM, TIMES and LEAP models and incorporating Input-Output Analysis, that allows for accounting of environmental, social and economic impacts. The modular design of the tool will take into account the necessary flexibility to deal with different levels and interests of stakeholders at great sectorial and spatial detail. Finally, transparency will be achieved through an open access freeware distribution of the model based on the open access programming language (Python), providing a detailed user manual, addressed to a wider non-specialist audience, and including free internet courses and learning materials.

There is a compelling need of encouraging energy efficiency in buildings, enhance green technologies and promote advance thermal energy storage solutions. TESSe2b will enable the optimal use of renewable energy and provide one of the most advantageous solutions for correcting the mismatch that often occurs between the supply and demand of energy in residential buildings. The target of TESSe2b is to design, develop, validate and demonstrate a modular and low cost thermal storage technology based on solar collectors and highly efficient heat pumps for heating, cooling and domestic hot water (DHW) production. The idea is to develop advanced compact integrated PCM TES tanks exploiting RES (solar and geothermal) in an efficient manner coupled with enhanced PCM borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) that will take advantage of the increased underground thermal storage and maximize the efficiency of the ground coupled heat pumps (GCHP). The two TES tanks developed within TESSe2b project will be integrated with different PCM materials; (i) enhanced paraffin PCM, (ii) salt-hydrates PCM, while in both of them a highly efficient heat exchanger will be included. Even if the concept of phase change thermal stores has been demonstrated, TESSe2b project discriminates itself through incorporating; (i) PCM materials innovation, (ii) advanced energy management through self-learning model-based control system, (iii) enhanced PCM BHEs (v) compact modular design of thermal storage tank. Since the lifetime of TESSe2b solution is among the most critical factors determining its acceptability, reliability and success the on the long run, special emphasis will be given in the life-expectancy of the involved components.

The Liftra self-hoisting crane (LSHC) enables significant cost savings on exchange of major components of wind turbines – which in turn reduces the cost of wind energy. With a crane that fits within a single 40 foot container, it is possible to change major components such as gearboxes and generators on wind turbines, with no restrictions on wind turbine height. Today there is more than 94.000 wind turbines installed worldwide in the size range from 1,4MW to 2,4MW, which is the current market range for the LSHC for changing of major components. Since each wind turbine conservatively requires minimum one major component exchange per 10 years, the market potential is between €235 million and €1,9 billion EUR per year in pure crane servicing costs. However, the value proposition of the LSHC does not only concern the existing market. The superior mobility of this technology enables major component service in remote areas with poor infrastructure and low access to large cranes. In turn this reduces the risk of installing wind turbines in less developed regions and may facilitate truly global expansion of wind energy. This far, the LSHC has been deployed project-to-project business model, according to which each commercial engagement is a unique solution, and based on thorough adaptation and testing on WT models. This approach is time consuming and very costly, thus, not scalable or replicable to global, mass markets. The project as a whole addresses the challenges of penetrating the market with an innovative new crane technology and allow fast scaling of the business worldwide to become the new industry standard through a mass customization-base business strategy. Successful project completion represents a significant business opportunity for our SME, with expected revenues of €125 million within 5 years, of which more than €22 million stand as direct profit. In addition, the successful market introduction of the LSHC is expected to create over 220 new jobs.