Even if significant progress has been made towards the Twin Transition, the recent energy crisis revealed the EU energy systems vulnerability and dependence on external energy sources and highlighted the need for intensifying the integration of RES in electricity, transport and building (heating) sectors. To achieve on this, the energy system shall transform from a centralised/fossil-fuel-based to an energy efficient, RES-based and interdependent system, operating with a high degree of flexibility offered by distributed assets. ODEON is conceived under the principle that this can only be realized through the creation of an inclusive ecosystem of stakeholders characterized a mesh of Data, Intelligence, Service and Market flows, jointly enabling the resilient operation of the energy system under increased RES integration and distributed flexibility. ODEON introduces a sound, reliable, scalable and openly accessible federated technological framework (i.e. ODEON Cloud-Edge Data and Intelligence Service Platform and corresponding Federated Energy Data Spaces. AI Containers, Smart Data/AIOps orchestrators) for the delivery of a wealth of services addressing the complete life-cycle of Data/AIOps and their smart spawn in federated environments and infrastructures across the continuum. It will integrate highly reliable and secure federated data management, processing, sharing and intelligence services, enabling the energy value chain actors and 3rd parties to engage in data/intelligence sharing, towards the delivery of innovative data-driven and intelligence-powered energy services in accordance to the objectives set by the DoEAP. ODEON results will be extensively validated in 5 large-scale demonstration sites in Greece, Spain, France, Denmark and Ireland involving all required value chain actors, diverse assets, heterogeneous grid and market contexts, and multi-variate climatic and socio-economic characteristics to support its successful replication and market uptake.

GIFT is an innovative project that aims to decarbonise the energy mix of European islands. European islands have to abide by the law of their countries that push toward a greener energy mix to comply with the European and international agreements. GIFT is willing to develop innovative systems to allow islands to integrate vast amount of renewables. In order to reach that goal, the coordinator INEA has built a well-balanced consortium gathering a total of 17 partners of 7 countries, including 1 industrial partner, 9 SMEs, two municipalities, 3 research centres and 2 universities. Through the development of multiple innovative solutions, such as a virtual power system, energy management systems for harbours, factories, homes, better prediction of supply and demand and visualisation of those date through a GIS platform, and innovative storage systems allowing synergy between electrical, heating and transportation networks, GIFT will increase the penetration rate of renewable energy sources into the islands’ grid, reducing their needs for diesel generation and thus decreasing the greenhouse gases emissions directly related to it. During 4 years, the partners will develop and demonstrate the solutions in two lighthouse islands, in Hinnøya, Norway’s largest island and the small island of Procida in Italy and study the replicability of the solution in a Greek and Italian islands at the minimum, respectively Evia and Favignana. The complementarity of these islands in terms of climate, energy mix, population and activities is meant to have solutions adaptable to different situations. To even increase this, the GIFT project has started to build a replication board with associations that already gather 1640 European islands that will be able to study replication for their territories. The consortium aims to provide sustainable solutions with a strong market uptake and plans to widely disseminate their solutions and replicate it on all relevant islands in the EU and beyond.

The LEAP-RE programme aligns with and responds to the AU-EU high-level policies and specific objectives of the CCSE Roadmap. It seeks to create a long-term partnership of African and European stakeholders in a quadruple helix approach: government (programme owners and funding agencies), research and academia, private sector, and civil society. Impact will be sought by creating a framework, methodology, and cooperation model. The aim is to reduce fragmentation by aligning existing bilateral and multilateral frameworks. LEAP-RE establishes and jointly implements research, innovation, and capacity-building activities that respond to the Multi-Annual Roadmaps (MARs) developed in PRE-LEAP-RE. The programme opted for a large-scale, inclusive consortium of 96 partners from 34 countries and 2 international organisations, to ensure a broad thematic, geographical and stakeholder coverage, and to demonstrate the feasibility of the collaboration and build trust in view of a long-term partnership addressing the post-2025 period. LEAP-RE draws on the experience and partnership developed in PRE-LEAP-RE, which conceptualised and developed a framework for long-term, bi-regional cooperation in research, innovation, and capacity building in renewable energies. This partnership is further strengthened by previous collaboration between partners in other projects supporting the EU-Africa HLPD on STI, such as LEAP-Agri, ERAfrica, LEAP4FNSSA, RINEA, and CAAST-Net Plus. Furthermore, the proposal includes a number of R&I partners, 8 individual projects (formalised as Work Packages), which were chosen among expressions of interest received in late 2019.

Energy power systems face big challenges to cope with grid integration demands of an ever-increasing number of distributed generation and consumption devices in an interconnected world. Technology offers a huge range of opportunities to develop solutions in the uncertain current and upcoming Energy market situation. This proposal considers Open Innovation as a natural solution to create a seamless link and balance between energy stakeholders needs and the solutions to be developed. Nowadays, old metering, operation and control devices are combined with smart systems with a huge amount of data being available yet unused or underused. This data offers a wide range of possibilities to improve existing energy services and creating new ones, all available in an Open Innovation Marketplace, and processed through an Analytic Toolbox. BD4OPEM will develop this Analytic Toolbox, based on Big data techniques, providing tools for enabling efficient business processes in the energy sector. By extracting more value from available data, a range of innovative services will be created in the fields of grid monitoring, operation and maintenance, network planning, fraud detection, smart houses/buildings/industries energy management, blockchain transactions and flexibility aggregation for demand-response. The Open Innovation Marketplace will ensure secure data flows from data providers to solution providers, always compliant with GDPR requirements, so that asset management is enhanced, consumer participation in energy balancing is promoted and new data-driven business models are created through innovative energy services. The project will demonstrate the above features in four large scale pilots with diverse distributed energy sources (e.g. PV, wind, hydro, EV, storage…), while promoting the competitiveness and synergies of Sustainable innovations and IT Ecosystems in Europe.

Gathering 11 African-based partners and 17 Europeans with offices or subsidiaries in Africa, the ENERGICA project is ambitiously fostering the collaboration between partners of both continents on energy access and sustainable energy development. Developing innovative and tailored solutions on productive use systems through innovative nano-grids in rural Madagascar in WP4; low-tech efficient biogas system, coupled with water purification demonstrated in peri-urban Sierra Leone in WP5; and solar powered e-mobility solution for boda-boda in urban Kenya in WP6, ENERGICA addresses a wide range of issues and provides solutions. From energy production, local renewable value chain development and e-mobility also providing flexibility services to the grid, ENERGICA is applicable to many different technical and socio-economic contexts. Built upon local stakeholders and through a co-creation methodology that will take additional local stakeholders’ inputs into account (WP2), ENERGICA aims to reach a powerful market uptake and wide replication (WP9) during and after the end of the project, with strong environmental and socio-economic local benefits (WP8). The innovative business models developed in WP7 will support this movement for local market uptake while some of the solutions will even rely upon local production and manufacturing, and local business and workforce participating to capacity building activities (WP3). Developing solutions that are based on renewable energy (mainly solar and biogas), and studying projected climate change impact evolution in Africa, ENERGICA will strengthen the joint EU-AU climate change and sustainable energy partnership effort and contribute to fighting climate change as well as improving health and social conditions in the demonstration sites and beyond. ENERGICA will demonstrate its solutions and gather data for 24 out of the 48 months that it will last and will directly impact positively more than 1500 local stakeholders across Africa.