In line with its vision, mission, core values, culture and principles the E³UDRES² Ent-r-e-novators project aims to co-create a more specific joint research and innovation strategy and a common agenda to accelerate the transformation into a European multi-institutional Research and Innovation Hub for Smart and Sustainable Regions. E³UDRES² Ent-r-e-novators includes, interacts and collaborates with a diverse variety of smart and ambitious people, academic institutions, regional authorities, companies, European R&I networks and regional innovation ecosystems. E³UDRES² Ent-r-e-novators is committed to scientific excellence and research integrity within its cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral key R&I networks and promotes (future) R&I competences, skills, resources, methods, training, services and management for collaborative research and open innovation for smart and sustainable regions.

EULAC ENERGYTRAN intends to strengthen the cooperation between the European Union and Latin American and the Caribbean research infrastructures to tackle a common challenge: how to get a clean, sustainable and just energy transition. This project pursues its goal through the exchange, generation and transfer of knowledge among entities from a multidisciplinary approach (technological, environmental, social) and through the support to the development of public policies and regulatory frameworks towards climate neutrality. This general goal will be achieved by four specific goals that respond the multidisciplinary approach, in tune with the complexity of the energy transition. Therefore, the project supports technological R&I to overcome the existing limitations of renewable energies but acknowledging these developments may have an environmental and social impact which must be addressed. This proposal wants to come up with ideas about how to achieve an energy transition compatible with environment protection and social justice. Energy transition is at the top of the political agendas of both regions, EU and LAC, so this project may contribute to consolidating it as a priority area of interregional scientific cooperation. This project will be carried out by a heterogenous and interdisciplinary consortium composed of eleven partners with wide presence in the EU and LAC. They include ERICS and an international organization, among other entities, from different areas of knowledge. This way the complexity of the energy transition is better tackled. Under this scheme, EULAC ENERGYTRAN will create a network of an interconnected and sustainable EU and LAC research infrastructures that contributes to energy transition by technological, social and sustainably strengthening the performance of entities through shared knowledge and close interactions among researchers. This common effort will mean a step forward, in both regions, to reach a society that needs to be resilient.

Motivated by an urgent need to mitigate climate change and, particularly, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food value chains, REDWine focuses on the utilization of biogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) from the wine fermentation process for microalgae biomass production and valorisation. A powerful synergy across bio-based industries results in REDWine’s innovative circular business model, which allows wine manufacturers to efficiently treat their liquid and gaseous effluents while profitably diversifying their revenues through the valorisation of Chlorella biomass into multiple high-value ingredients. The REDWine concept will be realized through the establishment of an integrated ‘Living Lab’ demonstrating the technical and economic viability of a system for collection and storage of the off-gas and liquid effluents of a 20,000L wine fermenter and its adaptation to microalgae cultivation and energy efficient harvesting technologies, in order to use 90% of the CO2 collected, to produce biomass. REDWine will demonstrate a circular concept through the development of a simple biorefinery to be deployed in the winery which will yield sustainable and cost competitive ingredients for food formulations (protein and fatty acids), cosmetics (peptides, carotenoid rich oils and active polysaccharides), agriculture (carbohydrates as vine biostimulants) and wine production (proteins for wine clarification). The proposed REDWine solution is expected to reduce the GHG emissions of the entire wine production value chain by at least 31% while potentially generating over €15M in revenues and creating 45 new jobs for a 7ML size winery on a 3-year time horizon. REDWine is led by primary producers, the AVIPE wine producers’ association, in partnership with 11 other very committed entities, including 7 SMEs, 1 LE, 2 RTOs and 1 UNI. The proposed consortium assures the all the needed multidisciplinary knowledge and a level of redundancy required for effective implementation of the project.

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 SCORES project aims is to develop and demonstrate in the field a building energy system including new compact hybrid storage technologies, that optimizes supply, storage and demand of electricity and heat in residential buildings, increasing self-consumption of local renewable energy in residential buildings at the lowest cost. Combination and optimization of multi-energy generation, storage and consumption of local renewable energy (electricity and heat) brings new sources of flexibility to the grid and giving options for tradability and economic benefits, enabling reliable operation with a positive business case in Europe’s building stock. SCORES optimizes self-consumption of renewable energy and defers investments in the energy grid. The SCORES concept is to develop several key-technologies in parallel, ie. second-life Li-ion batteries, compact thermal storage by Phase-Change Materials, high performance hot-water heat pump supplied by hybrid photovoltaic and solar collectors (PVT), Chemical Looping Combustion heat storage (seasonal storage), integrated through a smart Building Energy Management System (BEMS), and to demonstrate them together in a hybrid energy system. Full-scale demonstration will be done with regulatory/normative, economic and market boundaries taken into account. Demonstration of the integrated hybrid energy system will take place in two real buildings representative of different climate and energy system configurations for 3 cases, in Northern Europe with and without a heat grid, and in Middle/Southern Europe without a heat grid. Through smart combination and optimization on the system level SCORES will evaluate technical, economic and environmental benefits being larger than the sum of their parts. The partners in the consortium are the key actors for the required technologies that will be integrated in the project, representing strong industrial partners (OEMs) in the value chain for future exploitation of compact hybrid energy system.