"<< Objectives >>Drones4GREEN aims to:- Update HEI curricula in order to provide the practical and theoretical knowledge required for capitalizing the drone technology into industrial settings and pave the path towards an industry wide ""greenification"" and sensitization towards environmental and climatic parameters.- Confront aspects related to the professional use and exploitation of drone technology such as drone technical deployment and maintenance, data acquisition storage and visualization.<< Implementation >>Four transnational project meetings in three different countries for facilitating and coordinating all project managements and administrative tasks.Four WPs for generating open access results.Three multiplier events in three different countries for disseminating the project findings, focusing on the results generated through the intellectual outputs.One learning/teaching/training activity for training HEI students and staff members on drone technology their use in industrial applications.<< Results >>Well informed educational material on the use of drone technologies and their adoption in industrial applications.An update over current curricula targeting the relevant higher institutions to address concerning drone technology.A digital hub to support all relevant stakeholders. This hub will support open and distant access mainly based on an integrated web platform.Two application frameworks. One for surveillance systems and one to support a formal decision for stakeholders and handlers."

The rapid development of the energy domain with smart devices as well as the recent expansion of renewable power sources have raised significant challenges for the energy industries and the research community in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) domain. In order for the high expectations and the expected impact on the energy market’s practices to be met, the industrial community needs new well-educated professionals, even at the early stages of their life career, that continuously keep track of the latest technological advancements, while Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) need to discover efficient ways to disseminate the expertise developed through research projects and activities across Europe.This changing environment and context places new demands in terms of education and sets new requirements for university graduates. JAUNTY (Joint undergAduate coUrses for smart eNergy managemenT sYstems) is the beneficial result of transferring state of the art knowledge gained during the implementation of the innovative Horizon 2020 projects SDN-microSENSE and SPEAR – funded under the H2020 program – directly to undergraduate student’s classes. In this project, members of the SDN-microSENSE and SPEAR consortiums, develop distant courses and remote labs in Smart Energy Management Systems (SEMS) for undergraduate students, in order to address the energy power companies’ demands on emerging ICT technologies. The courses are provided through online platforms while students are exercised on smart grid deployments and management, via a newly developed platform for remote labs. All courses and labs are embedded to the participating HEIs curricula as elective courses and students successfully completed the program will be awarded with a Joint Qualifications Certificate on SEMS.Apart from its main academic content, the rationale behind JAUNTY project is to enable students with fewer opportunities to gain an international study experience without mobility by the so called “ERASMUS from Home”. Under this prism, new challenges are created for the European HEIs to prepare well-aware graduates in terms of their opportunities for further studies and employment on their specific areas of interest.

The clean energy transition requires at least a 55% reduction in GHG emissions (from 1990 levels) by 2030, according to the ‘Fit for 55’ package. Thus, electricity grids will be called upon to operate in an overall context of 50% electricity production from RES of any scale by 2030. Thus, several challenges will become even more apparent in the following years: (i) reliability issues in electricity grids due to rapid decarbonization, (ii) lack of circularity in conventional power plant’s decommissioning process, (iii) operational issues in sector-coupled systems under mass electrification scenarios, (iv) significant computation and data processing efforts are required to manage the future grid. GRAVITEQA highlights the synergetic benefits of gravitational storage, Quantum Computing (QC) and Quantum Inspired Computing (QIC), and data-driven, trustworthy AI-based analytics services. GRAVITEQA develops and validates 9 components/methodologies up to a TRL 4: (i) QC and QIC for the Facility Location Allocation and Load-side assets management problems, (ii) a generic and holistic methodology to find the optimal energy storage technology or mix of them, to transform a coal power plant and mine into a long duration energy storage plant, (iii) repurposing of available assets case study capable of providing long-term storage and enhancing recyclability of a under-decommissioning thermal power plant and an abandoned coal plant, (iv) conformal prediction for robust energy demand of cold ironing, (v) optimal charging of cold ironing and EVs respecting grid constraints for reliable green port operation, (vi) seaport electrification strategy for seaports: analysis and scenarios planning, (vii) fast nodal flexibility region estimation algorithm for 3-phase grids unlocking the flexibility services procurement from distributed RES, (viii) end-to-end trustworthy learning for non-convex optimization problems, and (ix) a reference design for edge inference in smart grid applications.

The EnergyShield project will develop an integrated toolkit covering the complete EPES value chain (generator, TSO, DSO, consumer). The toolkit combines novel security tools from leading European technology vendors and will be validated in large-scale demonstrations by end-users. The EnergyShield toolkit will combine the latest technologies for vulnerability assessment (automated threat modelling and security behaviour analysis), monitoring & protection (anomaly detection and DDoS mitigation) and learning & sharing (security information and event management). The integrative approach of the project is unique as insights produced by the various tools will be combined to provide a unique level of visibility to the users. For example, it will be possible to combine vulnerability scanning with automated threat modelling to provide insights into software vulnerabilities present in an architecture in combination with insights into what are the key assets, risks and weak links of the architecture. The toolbox will allow end-users to predict future attacks (as it provides insights to what attacks can be applied to the weakest links of the architecture) and learn from past attacks (for example using the insights from the vulnerability assessment and threat modelling to prevent attacks, and learning from attacks to update the probabilistic meta-model of the threat modelling). The toolkit will be implemented with the complete EPES value chain who will contribute to the specification, prototyping and demonstration phases of the project. Although the toolkit will be tailored to the needs of EPES operators, many of the technology building blocks and best practices will be transferable to other types of critical infrastructures. The consortium consists of 2 large industrial partners (SIVECO and PSI), whereof SIVECO is taking the lead supported by 6 innovative SMEs, 3 academic research organizations and 7 end-users representing various parts of the EPES value chain.