Intelligent Energy Europe expects district heating to double its share of the European heat market by 2020 while district cooling will grow to 25%. While this expansion will translate into 2.6% reduction in the European primary energy need and 9.3% of all carbon emissions, it will not be achieved through modernization and expansion alone but requires fundamental technological innovation to make the next generation of district heating and cooling (DHC) systems highly efficient and cost effective to design, operate and maintain. E2District aims to develop, deploy, and demonstrate a novel cloud enabled management framework for DHC systems, which will deliver compound energy cost savings of 30% through development of a District Simulation Platform to optimise DHC asset configuration targeting >5% energy reduction, development of intelligent adaptive DHC control and optimisation methods targeting an energy cost reduction between 10 and 20%, including flexible production, storage and demand assets, and system-level fault detection and diagnostics, development of behaviour analytics and prosumer engagement tools to keep the end user in the loop, targeting overall energy savings of 5%. Development of a flexible District Operation System for the efficient, replicable and scalable deployment of DHC monitoring, intelligent control, FDD and prosumer engagement, development of novel business models for DHC Operators, Integrators and Designers, validation, evaluation, and demonstration of the E2District platform, and development of strong and rigorous dissemination, exploitation and path-to-market strategies to ensure project outcomes are communicated to all DHC stakeholders. E2District addresses specifically the call’s objective related to the development of optimisation, control, metering, planning and modelling tools including consumer engagement and behaviour analytics and supports the integration of multiple generation sources, including renewable energy and storage.

Energy and transport are the highest emitters of greenhouse gases in the EU at 25% and 21% respectively of total emissions. Efficient management, conversion and distribution of thermal energy as well as converting excess or wasted heat into electricity presents a major opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and achieve net zero by 2050 in the energy and transport sectors and beyond e.g. heating and cooling distribution in buildings and districts, improved efficiency in renewables and more efficient, longer range electric vehicles. THERMINATOR will develop a new energy conversion technology in the form of an efficient low profile energy conversion “skin” that can be integrated into the fabric of a building or the wall of a pipe to reduce energy loss through active insulation or to provide temperature conversion in heat networks. It could be applied as a backing to improve efficiency of solar cells or integrated into the structure of a vehicle to support passenger comfort or improved efficiency of structural batteries. This novel technology integrates thermoacoustic and electrocaloric stages and operates at high frequency to achieve high power density (100W/cm2). Model-based smart controls and energy management will provide high efficiency and digital control for optimum performance and reliability and integration into digital networks. A focus on sustainability, circularity and socio-economic factors will ensure products with high environmental and social benefit. Developments will be validated to TRL4 by testing in use cases in thermal networks, solar generation and electric vehicle applications. THERMINATOR disruptive technology will support European companies in developing new high performance sustainable products through consortium members in thermal networks and solar power sectors alongside world-leading expertise in electrocaloric, thermoacoustic and ultrasonic technologies and skills in reliability, environmental assessment and exploitation planning.

NewSOL proposal addresses the specific challenge towards high efficiency solar energy harvesting by advance materials solutions and architectures that are in line with those specified in SET-plan. Its main objective is to develop advance materials solutions based on innovative storage media and concepts for Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) up to validation in field of their performance by real time monitoring. This will be supported by an innovative thermal energy storage design based on the combination of new functional and advanced materials, like heat thermal fluid, sensible and latent energy storage media and insulating materials, into two innovative plant architectures: single tank thermocline storage and concrete type module. The main challenges of NewSOL are: Develop two new system Architectures: I) Thermocline Tank, (combining sensible and latent heat up to 550ºC), and II) Concrete module tank (sensible heat up to 550ºC). The scope to fulfil the challenges is to validate four new advance materials:

PANOPTIS aims at increasing the resilience of the road infrastructures and ensuring reliable network availability under unfavourable conditions, such as extreme weather, landslides, and earthquakes. Our main target is to combine downscaled climate change scenarios (applied to road infrastructures) with simulation tools (structural/geotechnical) and actual data (from existing and novel sensors), so as to provide the operators with an integrated tool able to support more effective management of their infrastructures at planning, maintenance and operation level. Towards this, PANOPTIS aims to: - use high resolution modelling data for the determination and the assessment of the climatic risk of the selected transport infrastructures and associated expected damages; - use existing SHM data (from accelerometers, strain gauges etc.) with new types of sensor-generated data (computer vision) to feed the structural/geotechnical simulator; - utilize tailored weather forecasts (combining seamlessly all available data sources) for specific hot-spots, providing early warnings with corresponding impact assessment in real time; - develop improved multi-temporal, multi-sensor UAV- and satellite-based observations with robust spectral analysis, computer vision and machine learning-based damage diagnostic for diverse transport infrastructures; - design and implement a Holistic Resilience Assessment Platform environment as an innovative planning tool that will permit a quantitative resilience assessment through an end-to-end simulation environment, running “what-if” impact/risk/resilience assessment scenarios. The effects of adaptation measures can be investigated by changing the hazard, exposure and vulnerability input parameters; - design and implement a Common Operational Picture, including an enhanced visualisation interface and an Incident Management System. The PANOPTIS integrated platform (and its sub-modules) will be validated in two real case studies in Spain and in Greece.

The European ageing and inefficient residential building stock needs to be refurbished to achieve the targets relevant to energy efficiency and to secure healthy and comfortable living conditions. RECO2ST addresses the challenges of nZEB refurbishment through a systemic 3 step approach: Initially a Refurbishment Assessment Tool (RAT) will be deployed to create refurbishment scenarios, empowering the decision making of the building owner, public or private. Second, Action Plans for the renovation will be formed through Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) and finally a refurbishment package of innovative and customizable technologies will be installed (Retrofit-Kit) for personalized renovation. The Retrofit-Kit features cost efficient and modular technologies: Vacuum insulation (VIP), Modular Photovoltaics, Smart Windows with heating and cooling capacity, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Intelligent Energy Management (IEMS), Nature Based Technologies (NBT) and optionally Cool Materials and Solutions. Their integration into personalized refurbishment packages for four demonstration sites will be conducted and validated. The renovation assessment tool and associated technologies will be demonstrated in four apartment block buildings (Spain, Switzerland, UK and Denmark) capturing climatic and construction variability across Europe, in total 67 apartments and 4900m2 of build space. The renovation assessment tool will tested on early adopter sites during the project. The modularity and adaptability of the RECO2ST Retrofit-Kit is key to achieving the expected performance and the Least-Cost method developed in the project will facilitate achieving this performance for the right price with a personalized renovation Action Plan developed quickly and accurately for each site under renovation. The demonstration sites will be refurbished into nZEBs achieving savings between 71 and 99%, with excellent internal environmental quality and payback in less than 15 years.