European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency signed grant agreements on 6 May with 21 projects amounting to €123.481 million for several energy topics under the 2018-2020 Horizon 2020 Work Programme for the H2020 Energy call on Low Carbon Energy and the Cross Cutting call on Low Carbon and Circular Industries: H2020-LC-SC3-2020-NZE-RES-CC / H2020-LCCI-INEA-SingleStage.
Examples of funded projects
ENCLUDE: Environmental change and society, Social innovation, Transdisciplinarity, energy modelling, citizen engagement, mixed methods, energy citizenship, decarbonisation
ENCLUDE aims to help the EU to fulfil its promise of a just and inclusive decarbonisation pathway through sharing and co-creating new knowledge and practices that maximize the number and diversity of citizens who are willing and able to contribute to the energy transition.
The project will assemble, align and adapt disparate energy citizenship concepts for diverse communities of citizens and for different scales of policy making, lowering the barrier for action. It will also operationalise the energy citizenship concept at all scales of policy making and catalyse a chain reaction of decarbonisation actions across the EU.
ENCLUDE is dedicated also to the uptake of this new knowledge on energy citizenship to mobilize actions for decarbonisation, taking into account the interests and struggles of diverse citizen groups, including communities, who are often not invited to participate in these civic processes.
Project full title: Energy Citizens for Inclusive Decarbonization.
EU contribution: €2.9 million.
Total cost: €3.1 million.
Topic: H2020-LC-SC3-2020-NZE-RES-CC.
Duration: 36 months.
Partners: Switzerland, Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Austria, France, Belgium, North Macedonia, Romania, Greece, Canada.
ConsenCUS: Carbon capture and sequestration, Electrochemical CO2 capture, CO2 conversion, CO2 clusters, Cement, Magnesia, Oil refinery
ConsenCUS aims to provide an industrial roadmap to a net-zero carbon future through “Carbon neutral clusters by electricity-based innovations in Capture, Utilisation and Storage”. The project will demonstrate this concept by integrating a demonstration unit at major cement, magnesia and oil refining installations.
Life cycle analysis and techno-economic evaluations will address how the innovations can be exploited, optimising environmental benefits while providing sound business cases for the three sectors participating and beyond.
Project full title: CarbOn Neutral cluSters through Electricity-based iNnovations in Capture, Utilisation and Storage.
EU contribution: €12.8 million.
Total cost: €13.9 million.
Topic: LC-SC3-NZE-5-2020.
Duration: 48 months.
Partners: Netherlands, Denmark, United Kingdom, Romania, Greece, Canada, China.
NEFERTITI: Converting CO2 and H2O into solar fuels
NEFERTITI will develop an innovative highly efficient photocatalytic system enabling a simultaneous conversion of CO2 and H2O into solar fuels and thus provide a breakthrough alternative to transform CO2 into valuable products for energy and transport.
NEFERTITI aims to integrate novel heterogeneous catalysts and luminescent solar concentrators into two Photocatalytic flow reactors sourced by sunlight energy.
By increasing the sunlight conversion efficiency and improving light-harvesting and charge separation, NEFERTITI will overcome the remaining technological challenges, improve the competitiveness of the photocatalytic technologies and enable a carbon-neutral production of solar fuels in a single-step process. The consortium is composed of an experienced multidisciplinary team from the EU, China and USA, supported by an international Advisory Board.
Project full title: Innovative photocatalysts integrated in flow photoreactor systems for direct CO2 and H2O conversion into solar fuels.
EU contribution: €3.8 million.
Total cost: €4.6 million.
Topic: LC-SC3-RES-3-2020 - International Cooperation with USA and/or China on alternative renewable fuels from sunlight for energy, transport and chemical storage.
Duration: 48 months.
Partners: Spain, Ireland, Netherlands, Cyprus, Turkey, China, US.
CO2OLHEAT: Converting industrial waste heat into electricity
CO2OLHEAT aims at demonstrating a first-of-a-kind system allowing for the recovery of the vast amount of wasted heat at industrial level and then use it onsite to produce electricity. The project is based on CO2 supercritical (sCO2) technology and will demonstrate this technology at a cement plant in Czech Republic. CO2OLHEAT will strengthen EU industrial leadership in energy intensive industries (cement, glass, aluminium, power generation) and turbomachinery sectors, bridging the current gap on sCO2 turbomachinery that EU has with US and Japan-Korea.
Project full title: Supercritical CO2 power cycles demonstration in operational environment locally valorising industrial waste heat.
EU contribution: €14 million.
Total cost: €11.5 million.
Topic: LC-SC3-CC-9-2020 – Industrial (Waste) Heat-to-Power conversion.
Duration: 48 months.
Partners: Belgium, Italy, Germany, Romania, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Greece, Spain, France, Turkey.
The examples of projects funded by CINEA under the framework of Horizon 2020 clearly show the predominance of green and sustainable means of energy production in the European Union. With the European Green Deal, the EU has a target to make Europe the first carbon-neutral continent in the world and such projects under Horizon 2020 will certainly bring the EU closer to this goal. ECOPNET (European Cooperation and Partnership Network) cooperates closely with its partners to contribute to this goal of the EU and you can be a part of this exquisite network by becoming an ECOPNET Partner!
Background
These projects will all managed by CINEA and under the responsibility of DG Research & Innovation and DG ENER.
Source: European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency Newsroom