Five tonnes of waste per capita are generated every year in the EU. These annual 2.5 billion tonnes of waste contain large volumes of valuable materials for Europe’s industrial base. Proper collection of waste is a pre-condition for their optimal recovery. The current trend of increasing higher collection rates is promising, but progress is uneven between Members States and between regions. Good regional practices have the potential to serve as good practice examples for other regions. So far, however, results of existing studies and good practices have not been effective enough in supporting the implementation of better-performing systems elsewhere. The main objective of the COLLECTORS project is to overcome this situation and to support decision-makers in shifting to better-performing collection system. COLLECTORS will therefore: (1) Increase awareness of the collection potential by compiling, harmonizing and presenting information on systems for packaging and paper waste, WEEE and construction products via an online information platform. (2) Improve decision-making on waste collection by the assessment of twelve good practices on their performance on: (1) quality of collected waste; (2) economics; (3) environment; (4) societal acceptance. (3) Stimulate successful implementation by capacity-building and policy support methods that will increase the technical and operational expertise of decision-makers on waste collection. (4) Engage citizens, decision-makers and other stakeholders throughout the project for validation of project results and to ensure the usability of COLLECTORS-output. The COLLECTORS consortium is well-equipped to achieve these impacts as it is directly connected to more than 30 PROS and 2000+ authorities spread across the EU. In addition, the project is embedded in the full secondary raw material value chain ensuring alignment with waste management, recyclers and producers.

AWESOME network aims to educate eleven young researchers in the wind power operation and maintenance (O&M) field by constructing a sustainable training network gathering the whole innovation value chain. The main EU actors in the field of wind O&M have worked together, under the umbrella of the European Wind Energy Academy (EAWE), in order to design a training program coping with the principal R&D challenges related to wind O&M while tackling the shortage of highly-skilled professionals on this area that has been foreseen by the European Commission, the wind energy industrial sector and the academia. The overall AWESOME research programme tackles the main research challenges in the wind O&M field identified by the European wind academic and industrial community: (1) to develop better O&M planning methodologies of wind farms for maximizing its revenue, (2) to optimise the maintenance of wind turbines by prognosis of component failures and (3) to develop new and better cost-effective strategies for Wind Energy O&M. These main goals have been divided into eleven specific objectives, which will be assigned to the fellows, for them to focus their R&D project, PhD Thesis and professional career. The established training plan answers the challenges identified by the SET Plan Education Roadmap. Personal Development Career Plans will be tuned up for every fellow, being their accomplishment controlled by a Personal Supervisory Team. The training plan includes intra-network activities, as well as network-wide initiatives. The secondments at partner organizations and between beneficiaries are a key attribute of the training programme. Each fellow will be exposed to three different research environments from both, academic and industrial spheres. All the network activities will be developed in accordance with the established in the Ethical Codes and Standards for research careers development, looking therefore for talent, excellence and opportunity equality.

For reliable and affordable design and operation of wind power plants that also consider system-level stability and security as well as the surrounding natural and social environment, coordinated wind farm control (WFC) and asset management solutions play an important role. Additionally, given the urgency of growth implied by ambitious decarbonisation targets, artificial intelligence (AI) and other digitalisation concepts are major accelerators of the energy transition and a key enabler for integrating the processes and prospects of WFC technology into the operation and design of the future energy systems. To support wind farm owners/operators to make better decisions for system-wide optimised performance, TWAIN’s concept pivots on a full-integration of WFC at five different levels: 1) integration of multi-source and multi-format data of varied nature from wind farms in different life stages; 2) AI-enabled integration of multi-disciplinary processes and phenomena affecting the wind farm operation; 3) integration of multi-objective prospects of WFC to assess the true added value of a certain operation mode; 4) integration of multi-level controllers and scenario analyses in decision support provision for harmonious co-existence of WPPs with their environment and society via optimised operation and design; and 5) integration of wider audience to TWAIN outcomes. TWAIN decision support environment is a digital environment architected for multi-source data integration and optimised computing, which contains a set of toolboxes with the critical analytical steps to operate a wind farm effective and efficiently. It is oriented to wind power asset management by WF owners/operators, considering as asset the WT and its components within a WF.

Floating offshore wind is still a nascent technology and its LCOE is substantially higher than onshore and bottom-fixed offshore wind, and thus requires to be drastically reduced. The COREWIND project aims to achieve significant cost reductions and enhance performance of floating wind technology through the research and optimization of mooring and anchoring systems and dynamic cables. These enhancements arisen within the project will be validated by means of simulations and experimental testing both in the wave basin tanks and the wind tunnel by taking as reference two concrete-based floater concepts (semi-submersible and spar) supporting large wind turbines (15 MW), installed at water depths greater than 40 m and 90 m for the semi-submersible and spar concept, respectively. Special focus is given to develop and validate innovative solutions to improve installation techniques and operation and maintenance (O&M) activities. They will prove the benefits of concrete structures to substantially reduce the LCOE by at least15% compared to the baseline case of bottom-fixed offshore wind, both in terms of CAPEX and OPEX. Additionally, the project will provide guidelines and best design practices, as well as open data models to accelerate the further development of concrete-based semi-submersible and spar FOWTs, based on findings from innovative cost-effective and reliable solutions for the aforementioned key aspects. It is aimed that the resulting recommendations will facilitate the cost-competitiveness of floating offshore wind energy, reducing risks and uncertainties and contributing to lower LCOE estimates. COREWIND aims to strength the European Leadership on wind power technology (and specially floating). To do so, the project consortium has been designed to ensure proper collaboration between all stakeholders (users, developers, suppliers, academia, etc.) which is essential to accelerate commercialization of the innovations carried out in the project.

Emerging technologies as Offshore Wind Energy, demand new advanced solutions for reducing Operation & Maintenance (O&M) costs, as well as for performing the reliability and extended life-time of wind turbines (WT) and farms (WF). In this sense, ROMEO is a 5 years project whose main objective is to develop and demonstrate an O&M information management and analytics platform capable of improving the decision making processes of offshore WF operators allowing the transition from calendar base maintenance to condition-based maintenance strategies reducing significantly O&M costs. Thus, a flexible and interoperable IoT platform will provide an advanced analytics ecosystem to better understand the real time behaviour of the main components of the WTs under operation conditions; maximizing their life-time and reducing the need for maintenance, thus minimizing the OPEX which drastically impact on LCoE of offshore Wind Energy. The project has been structured in three phases: 1st phase “specifications” will pave the way for other phases, defining the specifications and requirements in order to develop a health monitoring strategy for the most relevant and critical components to be further considered. -nd phase “models/tools/database” will be devoted to the development of health monitoring systems, diagnosis and prognosis tools for failure detection both at WTG components and support structures level, feeding the development of a data acquisition and advanced analytics ecosystem. 3rd phase “O&M/rollout” will develop and deploy an O&M platform to be validated in three pilot scenarios, data that will serve as input for impact assessment with a special focus on LCoE and replicability. ROMEO consortium is formed by a well-balanced set of experts (12 entities from 7 countries) representing the whole offshore value chain (from WT components manufacturers and service providers through to WF operators) together with IT market leaders, thus ensuring that results will reach the market.