Today, the heating sector is not on track toward achieving the IEA Net-Zero targets: it represents more than a third of the energy demand and it mainly relies on fossil fuels. District heating is recognized as a major solution allowing decarbonization of the heating sector. The integration of large-scale seasonal energy storage, compensating for the mismatch between supply and demand whilst ensuring the service, is key for a wide spread of district heating. USES4HEAT aims to demonstrate innovative, large-scale, seasonal thermal energy storage solutions enabling a future decarbonized and reliable heating supply. USES4HEAT demonstrates, at TRL8 and for a one-year test campaign, two innovative, cost-effective, large-scale, seasonal underground TES units to maximize the availability and resilience of heating supply while reducing energy losses and environmental impact. USES4HEAT seeks to demonstrate the storages as fully integrated units in commercial large-scale district heating networks and industrial waste heat recovery and fulfilling industrial thermal demand. In doing so, USES4HEAT also demonstrates six innovative key enabling components/technologies and their integration with seasonal storages: advanced drilling equipment and remotely controlled machines halving drilling times, innovative layered high-temperature borehole pipes, efficient groundwater heat pumps integrated with aquifer storages, hybrid solar panels and thermal solar collector, and accurate AI-based energy management tools. USES4HEAT will systematically demonstrate the effectiveness and techno-economic-social viability of innovative, large-scale, seasonal energy storages ensuring limited CAPEX, reduced environmental impact and energy losses, efficient integration in district heating and accumulation of various sources of heat, and granting reliable and decarbonized heating supply.

The European Commission’s policy framework (i.e., Clean Energy Package, FiT 55) seeks to decarbonise the energy system, encouraging the electrification of heat and transport, as well as the connection of more clean but intermittent generation. Electricity markets and smart grid digitalization should proceed very fast to enable the fulfillment of these targets, incentivizing energy consumers and maximizing the use of assets from different energy consumption sectors (i.e., electricity, water, heating, cooling, mobility) in order to fully exploit the flexibility services. ENFLATE project will build upon existing solutions on data drivel energy services and non-energy services, and replicate them in different geographies, climate and consumer needs. It will propose applicable consumer-centered flexibility platforms and test them in Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland engaging local consumers, TSOs, DSOs, market operators, regulatory authorities, service providers, manufacturers, academia. It will provide smart grid innovative technologies, peer-to-peer market platforms for consumers, smart building and local community cross vector flexibility services, integration of consumer centered flexibility with pan European spot markets. Efficient business models will be developed and tested, combing energy services with health and mobility services. The developed ENFLATE project will be interoperable with existing data platforms in Horizon 2020, like ONENET, CoordiNET, SmartNet and INTERRFACE, leveraging the benefits of data exchange and adaptive middleware architectures. ENFLATE will evaluate the impact of the proposed multi-vector flexibility services to local, regional and pan European level.

5G is envisioned to be the first global technology standard that will address the variety of future use cases of the energy sector, by ensuring that both the radio and core network performance requirements can be met in terms of end-to-end latency, reliability and availability. Up-to-now, the main discussion for 5G has been to support the next wave of smart grid features and efficiency at the behind-the-meter level, by integrating many low-voltage devices into the power grid through low-cost connections, managing demand and load balance domestically, aiming the reduction of the electricity peaks and energy costs. However, it is expected that, as the emergence of smart grids will grow, a lion share of the growth will take place in the medium-voltage levels: towards secondary substations and distributed energy resources, as well as between secondary substations and primary substation. Smart5Grid aims to revolutionise the Energy Vertical industry through the successful establishment of four fundamental functions of modern smart grids, i.e., (i) automatic power distribution grid fault detection, (ii) remote inspection of automatically delimited working areas at distribution level, (iii) millisecond level precise distribution generation control, and (iv) real-time wide area monitoring in a creative cross-border scenario, thus assisting power grid operators and other energy stakeholders (e.g., smart grid operators, distribution system operators/transmission system operators, energy service providers, etc.) Not only this. Smart5Grid introduces an open 5G experimental facility, supporting integration, testing and validation of existing and new 5G services and NetApps from third parties (i.e., SMEs, developers, engineers, etc., that do not belong in the consortium) since underpinning experimentation with a fully softwarised 5G platform for the energy vertical industry is one of the key targets of the proposal. Moreover, in order to supply start-ups and newcomers with the opportunity to accelerate their growth in the high impact industry of the energy vertical, Smart5Grid provides an open access NetApp repository, provisioning support and assistance to third parties through a clear and trustworthy experimentation roadmap.

JUST STREETS is the project proposal from a team of 30 partners from 17 countries, including 12 cities representing more than 4,5m citizens. It aims to transform cities’ car-centered mobility narratives that take for granted that streets are for motorized traffic only, promoting walking, cycling and other active modes of mobility. JUST STREETS will be re-shaping street infrastructure and changing individual mobility behavior in 12 cities, while proactively sharing the generated “how-to-do-it” knowledge with hundreds of cities for rapid replication across Europe. In close collaboration with citizens, policy makers, experts, and interest groups the project will not only develop a new vision of spatial justice where streets become public space for all, but equally important find ways to rapidly implement changes. A strong focus is on displaying how necessary transformations in the face of climate change can (and must) successfully improve social justice, accessibility, inclusivity, and security along the way. Putting marginalized social groups, the most vulnerable mobility users, as well as those citizens at the core of JUST STREETS that have been previously underrepresented in mobility infrastructure decision-making will allow the project to create highly valuable knowhow, critical in creating better, more just, and sustainable cities for all citizens. The unique composition of the JUST STREET consortium is critical in making sure this knowledge is not only created, but subsequently shared with as many urban decision makers as possible from cities across Europe who have the means to initiate transformation in their cities. Top-level research and organizations with vast experience in the fields of mobility, urban planning, climate change, and social transformation are collaborating with the communication and dissemination expert partners who have established channels to reach and interact with tens of thousands urban decision-makers that will shape the future of cities

Local Energy communities (LEC) have been recognized by EC as key measure to boost EU energy transition. At the same time digitalization of EU energy system and a proper data sharing among energy players look crucial to foster best practice sharing and the creation of a knowledge community to tackle one of the most urgent global crisis of our society: climate change. DATA CELLAR aims therefore to create a public energy dataspace that will support the creation, development and management of LECs in EU. Such dataspace will be easy to be populated (also via an innovative rewarded private metering approach) and easy to interact with, also guaranteeing a smooth integration with other EU energy dataspaces and providing to LEC stakeholders services and tools for developing their activities. DATA CELLAR will implement a collaborative platform providing an interoperable, modular, and secure energy data space capable of delivering access to datasets, Decision Support Tool and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to serve and support the spread LECs. In the framework of the project DATA CELLAR and its services will be used by representatives of nine validation cases around EU and with different level of maturity promoted by different type of actors such as public authorities, DSOs, aggregators etc.. DATA CELLAR will also used to drive transversal activities such as EU energy scenarios and market planning (EDF, NODES). DATA CELLAR will facilitate data collection/sharing from both LEC stakeholders, researchers and tenants also targeting the development of a marketplace and a tokenization rewarding approach that can stimulate such actors to both use and populate the data space. At this purpose and also considering data interaction with the other EU existing energy dataspaces/initiatives (GAIA-X, OPEN DEI…) towards the creation of a federated EU Energy Data Space, DATA CELLAR will also study ethical, regulatory, cybersecurity and governance aspects for data handling/sharing.