This project will develop a decision-support system (DSS) for disaster risk management by considering multiple interacting natural hazards and cascading impacts using a novel resilient-informed and service-oriented approach that accounts for forecasted modifications in the hazard (e.g., climate change), vulnerability/resilience (e.g., aging structures and populations) and exposure (e.g., population decrease/increase). The primary deliverable from MEDiate will be a decision support framework in the form of service-orientated web tool and accompanying disaster risk management framework providing end users (local authorities, businesses etc) with the ability to build accurate scenarios to model the potential impact of their mitigation and adaptation risk management actions. The scenarios, which can be customised to reflect local conditions and needs (e.g., demographics, deprivation, natural resources etc), will be based on a combination of the historical record and future climate change projections to forecast the location and intensity of climate related disaster events and to predict their impacts, including cascading impacts, on the vulnerability of the local physical, economic and social systems. The scenarios will allow end users to evaluate the potential impact of different risk management strategies to reduce vulnerability and enhance community resilience. The project will consist of analysis of relevant data and co-development with testbed decision-makers of a DSS to enable more reliable resilience assessments, accounting for risk mitigation and adaptive capabilities, to be made, therefore reducing losses (human, financial, environmental etc) from future climate-related and geophysical disasters. The project will involve a multi-disciplinary team of geophysical and meteorological scientists, risk engineers, social scientists, information technologists and end-users, working together to ensure that the system is user-led and supported by appropriate technology.

EEnvest aims at supporting investors´ decision making process by translating building’s energy efficiency technical requirements into economic indicators. These indicators are in turn used to evaluate financial risks associated with deep renovation investment and to include non-energy benefits in asset evaluation models. EEnvest will allow the financial sector to match the EE investments demand and offer for commercial office buildings located in Italy and Spain. EEnvest will increase financers’, investors’, owners’ and users’ mutual trust, by identifying, quantifying and mitigating technical risks associated to those investments as well as by reducing the cost of credit for lenders through targeted risk reduction actions. EEnvest will develop effective evaluation methods for the technical/financial risk correlation by categorising a number of major technical risks and quantifying their impact on investors´ confidence. Those risks will be i) evaluated exploiting existing databases on building energy efficiency (e.g. DEEP database of Energy Efficincy Financial Institutions Group), ii) organized into investor friendly bechmark track record and iii) transferred on a web-based platform through secured blockchain networks The investment demand and offer will be supported by the EEnvest - search&match investment evaluation web-based platform, integrating building stock evaluation data, both from the technical and the financial side. EEnvest approach will be replicable in more countries and business cases thanks to the standardization of technical/financial due diligence framework for energy efficiency renovation of buildings and to the search&match web-based platform allowing deep renovation investments to be more appealing on the financial market.

SUM4Re proposes a comprehensive approach to creating materials banks from the built environment by combining urban mining and technologies for automated on-site data acquisition and building materials identification and asset components. The project aims to achieve nine objectives, including developing a traceability system for building materials, developing a holistic methodological framework for assessing circular use of construction products, and developing on-site and off-site smart digital solutions to identify construction entities and analyse their properties. The methodology of SUM4Re is based on a systemic approach that encompasses three main activities: identification, analysis, and contribution to circularity. The project aims to develop software tools and databases based on robust identification assisted by AI and other digital techniques, supported by blockchain solutions, and consider circular economy processes such as Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle, and Renovate. SUM4Re will improve the BIM standard to support current circular (C-BIM) challenges, following open standards and ensuring interoperability with commercial databases. SUM4Re proposes three demonstration pilots linked to construction projects to validate the methodology and a strategy for skill development to upskill the workforce in the construction sector and facilitate the uptake of the solutions developed. Overall, SUM4Re aims to support the transition towards circular construction practices and reduce the amount of construction and demolition waste sent to landfills. The relevance of the project lies in the need to address the increasing generation of construction and demolition waste, which is the largest waste stream in the EU, as well as the problems associated with CO2 emissions and climate change. The project emphasizes the use of new techniques and technologies to rapidly identify materials and support circular construction practices.

HYBRIDplus:Advanced HYBRID solar plant with PCM storage solutions in sCO2 cycles. HYBRIDplus aims to pioneer the next generation of CSP with an advanced innovative high-density and high-temperature thermal energy storage (TES) system capable of providing a high degree of dispatchability at low cost and with much lower environmental burden than the State of the Art. This thermal storage is based in the Phase Change Material (PCM) technology in a cascade configuration that can reproduce the effect of a thermocline and integrates recycled metal wool in its nucleus that provide hybridization possibilities by acting as an electric heater transforming non-dispatchable renewable electricity such as PV into thermal stored energy ready to be dispatched when needed. HYBRIDplus proposes a novel approach to concentrated solar power with a PV+Cascade PCM-TES CSP configuration based on a high temperature supercritical CO2 cycle working at 600 ºC. This new plant is called to form the backbone of the coming energy system thanks to a higher efficiency and lower LCoE than state-of-the-art technology, and in addition to other benefits such as full dispatchability reached with the hybridization in the storage that allow higher shares of variable output renewables in the energy system and environmental friendliness (lower CO2 emissions, minimum water consumption, enhancement life cycle impact).

The overall objective of WEDISTRICT is to demonstrate DHC as an integrated solution that exploits the combination of RES, thermal storage and waste heat recycling technologies to satisfy 100% of the heating and cooling energy demand in new DHC and up to 60-100% in retrofitted DHC. For this purpose, the focus of WEDISTRICT is large-scale replication of best practice: better valorisation of local resources, like renewable and waste heat by making District Heating and Cooling networks more efficient in relation to the use of new resources. In parallel, systems will evolve to provide even more flexible solutions by the integration of innovative molten-salts based thermal storage, the interaction with other energy networks (electricity and gas) and the involvement of end-users (operators and consumers) through ICT-based control and decision making. Finally, to enable significant expansion, cost-effectiveness will be enhanced by transitioning from handicraft to more industrialised solutions that integrate LEAN methodologies to optimise processes and lower costs.