The turnover of mining and quarrying in Europe reaches up to 224 billion Euros and has generated EUR 64.9 billion of value added, 1% of the non-financial business economy total. The rise of key enabling technologies and the urbanisation and industrialisation of emerging economies in combination with increase in population and living standards will continue to drive growing demand for raw materials. The need to extract raw materials in a profitable, environmentally sound, and safe way for both mining workforce and communities is driving the mining industry towards innovative approaches to transform operations. Even though Industry 4.0 offers a wide spectrum of solutions, and intelligent technologies to address respective challenges, the mining industry hesitates to adopt such innovative approaches when compared to downstream industries. In addition, the need for a human-centred, environmentally oriented and society-driven approach is emerging in developing Industrial Internet of Things technologies for mining. Dig_IT will address the needs of the mining industry to move forward towards a sustainable use of resources while keeping people and environment at the forefront of their priorities. In order to achieve that Dig_IT proposes the development of a smart Industrial Internet of Things platform (IIoTp) that will improve the efficiency and sustainability of mining operations by connecting cyber and physical systems. The platform will collect data from sensors at 3 levels: (i) human, (ii) assets, (iii) environment and will also incorporate both market real time and historical data. The impact of Dig_IT to the European Mining industry, but also the society itself, can be summarised in the following (with a horizon of 4 years after project ends): (i) increase of the mining efficiency by 17%, (ii) increased OEE for machines and loading by 20% and 18% respectively, (iii) 19% reduction of CO2eq, (iv) about 310 new jobs created and (v) over 28M EUR ROI for the consortium.

Heat Pump and solar appliances are the most social accepted residential Renewable Energy based energy systems. SunHorizon will demonstrate up to TRL 7 innovative and reliable Heat Pump solutions (thermal compression, adsorption, reversible) that acting properly coupled and managed with advanced solar panels (PV, Hybrid, thermal) can provide heating and cooling to residential and tertiary building with lower emissions, energy bills and fossil fuel dependency. A Cloud based functional monitoring platform will be realised in the project to be the “performance data mine” for the development of Data Driven/KPI oriented optimized algorithms and tools to predict maintenance, optimize the management towards maximisation of solar exploitation and give to the manufacturer inputs for new installation design, via an innovative “robust design under uncertainty approach” which aims to overcome classical H&C equipment oversizing due to safety factors . This monitoring platform will also drive smart end user interfaces that will be applied at building level to collect thermal comfort data towards a new end-user driven H&C control system. SunHorizon tools will be applicable not only to proposed solar coupled HPs, but to all H&C appliances towards a global increasing efficiency of EU H&C stock and its decarbonisation. 5 low emission H&C Technology packages (TPs) will be tested coupling HP and solar installation. SunHorizon aims to be a breakthrough demonstration to market project involving 21 partners and 8 demosites all around EU focusing its activities on “reducing system costs and improving performance as well as optimising existing technologies for H&C applications”. SunHorizon will be focused on three main research pillars interacting each other towards project objectives achievement, demonstration and replication: i) OPTIMIZED DESIGN, ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING OF SUNHORIZON TECHNOLOGIES ii) SMART FUNCTIONAL MONITORING FOR H&C,iii) KPI DRIVEN MANAGEMENT AND DEMONSTRATION.

Pentagon is a 3-years research and innovation project that will investigate the potential of wider deployment of energy conversion technologies and strategies at district-level, with the aim to foster flexibility in the low-voltage and medium-voltage grid. The rationale that underlies Pentagon approach is that multi-vector smart districts can be the key enablers of future smart grids, provided their flexibility capabilities are augmented with adequate energy conversion technologies. To this end, Pentagon will deliver two key technology assets: a highly efficient power-to-gas installation sized for coupling with typical district heating plants and a multi-vector multi-scale district energy management platform for the combined monitoring and management of all district energy carriers. The power-to-gas technology will achieve a 15 to 25% energy gain compared to state-of-the-art performances. The multi-vector multi-scale district energy management platform will achieve 15 to 20% more flexibility at district-level, allowing for a 25% increase of renewable penetration, by leveraging building and district power to heat conversion capabilities. These impacts will be thoroughly assessed through an iterative validation and demonstration roadmap that will start with lab-scale individual component testing, continue with a focused deployment in district-scale experimental facilities, and conclude with a wider simulation-based assessment at distribution grid level that will rely on a real smart district from a project partner. Based on the results of the validation and demonstration, Pentagon will be able to implement an exploitation roadmap aimed both at (a) preparing the commercialization of the results (5-years post-project horizon) and (b) the definition and targeted dissemination of innovative local energy aggregation business models, leveraging a 200+ member stakeholder community and connections between PENTAGON and relevant market design standardization initiatives.

TABEDE aims to allow all buildings equipped with Building Energy Management Systems to integrate energy grid demand response schemes, overcoming limitations linked to missing interoperability, at reducedcost. For that purpose, TABEDE will allow connection of all dispatchable loads to the Building Energy System through a dedicated TABEDE interface, whatever the communication protocol. A dedicated smart grid communication protocol translator will be provided to ease the acceptance of the TABEDE system as well as a database of dispatchable load drivers. Moreover, in order to improve building efficiency, novel building energy management strategies will be proposed, in terms of electric load and thermal management, adapting to the evolving environment, as well as building continuous monitoring. TABEDE solution will be demonstrated and assessed through extensive simulation-based testing. The proposed solutions will be deployed on three test sites (residential and tertiary) that are representative of EU building stocks and conditions.

SMARTeeSTORY will propose an integrated building automation and control systems for monitoring and optimizing building energy performance according to an innovative multi-domain approach (integrating SRI domains: HVAC, Dynamic Faade, Lighting, EV), incorporating historical building requirements as well as human requirements by envisaging real-time and active user engagement. SMARTeeSTORY system will automatically detect (interacting with users via specific technologies identified in project early stages, e.g. smart home systems) the building users archetypes (via DRL algorithms) therefore specific preferences (SMARTeeSTORY database of users archetypes and preferences in smart buildings energy demand, comfort, etc.) informing the optimization and control services. Such a system will encompass interoperable and cyber-secure software (cloud-based middleware provided with multiple services for: monitoring & digital twin, analysis and prediction, optimization and control, embedding physics and data-based models for forecasting building energy performance and using Digital Building Logbook as a Common Data Environment) and hardware (advanced edge computers, multi-protocols data gateways, smart and automated sun blinds, smart sensors and actuators for Technical Building Systems integrated control according to occupancy and energy efficiency needs, smart products for user engagement) solutions fully enabling the three functionalities required for a building to become smart: i) optimization of operation of technical building systems, ii) adapting to the external environment (including energy grids), changing condition in relation to demands from building occupants. The system will be deployed at TRL 8 in three demo sites (non-residential historic buildings) identified in Latvia, Spain and The Netherlands to demonstrate buildings improved energy performance in correlation to the increased smartness rating.