The European energy system is undergoing a significant transformation: decarbonization, security of supply, deployment of renewables and their integration into the market, generating significant opportunities and challenges for energy stakeholders. Despite all energy efficiency efforts, overall demand for decarbonized electricity is set to be significantly higher in 2050 than today due to the decarbonization of the heating, cooling, transport and many industrial sectors, which can only be achieved via efficient and smart electrification. Hydropower is a key technology in supporting the European pathway to a decarbonized energy system and to achieve global leadership in renewable energy generation. It consists a renewable and highly sustainable electricity resource and can supply the European power system with stability and valuable flexibility. In addition, hydropower reduces EU’s dependency on fossil imports and renders multiple extra benefits for society in the river basins such as support to irrigation, water supply and flood control. The D-HYDROFLEX project will advance excellence in research on digital technology for hydropower paving the way towards more efficient, more sustainable, and more competitive hydropower plants in modern power markets. D-HYDROFLEX will develop a toolkit for digitally ‘renovating’ the existing hydroelectric power plants based on sensors, digital twins, AI algorithms, hybridization modelling (power-to-hydrogen), cloud-edge computing and image processing. The core pillars of the project will be: (i) digitalization, (i.e., digital twins for hydro dams and machinery, weather and flow forecasts, cyber-resilience), (ii) flexibility, (i.e., coordination with hydrogen, storage and VPP operation) and (iii) sustainability, (i.e., biodiversity environmental issues). Validation will take place in real hydro plants of EDF (France), TEE (Poland), PPC (Greece), TASGA (Spain) and INTEX (Romania), covering different geographical areas of Europe.

ProCleanLakes targets to combat the combined impact of various disruptive factors that generate continuous pressure on the lake's ecosystem status and facilitate the accumulation of emerging, non-regulated, chemical contaminants and nutrient enrichment. The project will design and demonstrate the feasibility of integrated nature-based emerging approaches for joint protection and restoration of European Natural Lakes (ENL) and their biodiversity, considering scenarios which imply the presence of various pressures that affect the aquatic ecosystems' status. The holistic transdisciplinary approaches that are to be used in the project, based on the synergic effect of the economic-environment-social nexus, targets to support the improvement of ENL ecological and chemical status in association with major EU instruments, sustainable development goals and policies related to freshwater ecosystems. The project engages multiple sites affected by the presence of various pressures and stressors, that will be the subjects for the demonstration of integrated protection and restoration solutions efficiency. A replication roadmap powered by the necessity of assuring upscaling and universality of the optimal integrated solutions (IS) will be developed to prove the replicability. An IS support platform which merges a business accelerator with an adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) solution for empowering citizen science related to lakes protection and restoration will assure the collaboration between the municipalities and citizens and will offer capacity-building and encourage co-development and co-design towards natural lakes protection and restoration. Tools such as mobile decision support platforms, serious games for digital readiness, e-learning and augmented-based modules for reinforce-learning and multiple AI machine learning analytical frameworks will be developed to assure the synergic approach toward the maximization of integrated solutions impact and replicability.

The EU goals for the clean energy transition require at least a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (from 1990 levels) by 2030, according to the ‘Fit for 55’ package. To achieve these goals, electricity grids will be required to operate in an overall context of 50% electricity production from RES of any scale by 2030. The huge rise in the share of solar PV and wind in total generation fundamentally reshapes the European power system and significantly increases the need to build new HVAC or HVDC cable connections. These will have a crucial role to link islands or offshore wind parks to mainland or to connect countries over long distances. The CABLEGNOSIS project aims to deliver innovative cable technologies that will support the clean energy transition era for the 2050 targets set at European level. CABLEGNOSIS project will develop innovative insulation and conductor design technologies, high performance and environmentally friendly cable insulation materials, ageing studies of superconducting cables, recyclability technologies for the materials used in power cables, as well as pre-fault condition, aging and remote monitoring AI-based tools. A feasibility assessment framework and detailed analysis for the use of superconducting cables for submarine connections. A respective feasibility analysis will be developed for the offshore wind parks in The Netherlands and Germany. The CABLEGNOSIS technologies will be validated in five European countries (Italy, UK, Greece, Hungary, Cyprus). CABLEGNOSIS will deliver a complete deployment plan for supporting the development and operation of efficient, reliable and environmentally friendly cable systems to support the energy transition. The deployment plan will provide the scalability and replicability framework of using the CABLEGNOSIS technologies in future cable development projects, with emphasis in the UK-Morocco interconnection, Cyprus-Israel interconnection, offshore developments in the Aegean Sea.

The European Commission’s Long-Term Strategy describes a number of pathways that reach between 80% and 100% decarbonisation levels. In every pathway a high level of direct and indirect electrification is envisaged, supported by a large-scale deployment of RES. The European power system has to address the residual load variability, on all timescales: from frequency response to inter-year flexibility. The main candidate solutions to provide flexibility are networks, demand-response, dispatchable and flexible power generation technologies, and energy storage. The appropriate deployment of innovative energy storage technologies is of primary importance for the clean energy transition. Sustainability and circular economy approach for storage innovations will minimize the environmental footprint and enhance the overarching efforts for achieving the European Green Deal targets. SINNOGENES project aims to develop the Storage INNOvations (SINNO) energy toolkit, a complete framework of methodologies, tools and technologies that will enable the grid integration of innovative storage solutions beyond the state-of-the art, while demonstrating sustainability, technical performance, lifetime, non-dependency on location geographical particularities and cost. It will develop successful energy storage business cases and systems and deploy them in innovative and 'green' energy systems at different scales and timeframes. SINNOGENES will target the effective integration of innovative energy storage systems and value chains at the interface of renewable energies and specific demand sectors, while ensuring the compatibility of systems and standards of distributed energy storage for participation in flexibility markets. Six pilot projects will take place in Portugal, Spain, Germany, Greece and Switzerland while a detailed scalability and replicability analysis will prove the wide impact of SINNOGENES project innovations at pan European level.

To achieve its energy goals EU needs to establish a geographically large market by initially improving its cross-border electricity interconnections. A geographically large market, based on imports and exports of electricity, could increase the level of competition, boost the EU’s security of electricity supply and integrate more renewables into energy markets. Electricity should, as far as possible, flow between Member States as easily as it currently flows within Member States, so as to increase sustainability potential and real competition as well as to drive economic efficiency of the energy system. To this end, FARCROSS aims to address this challenge by connecting major stakeholders of the energy value chain and demonstrating integrated hardware and software solutions that will facilitate the “unlocking” of the resources for the cross-border electricity flows and regional cooperation. The project will promote state-of-the-art technologies to enhance the exploitation/capacity/efficiency of transmission grid assets, either on the generation or the transmission level. The hardware and software solutions will increase grid observability to facilitate system operations at a regional level, exploit the full potential of transmission corridors for increased electricity flows that will facilitate transition to flow-based regional market coupling, consider cross-border connections and their specific ICT and grid infrastructure, planning to use a wide-area protection approach to ensure the safe integration of renewable energy sources into the grid, mitigate disturbances, increase power system stability. An innovative regional forecasting platform will be demonstrated for improved prognosis of renewable generation and demand response and a capacity reserves optimization tool will be tested to maximize cross-border flows. The non-harmonization of national regulation will be studied and measures will be recommended to avoid distortion of the technology benefits.