The ECHO project seeks to establish Energy Community and innovative energy services Excellence Hubs in Türkiye, Greece, and Portugal. These hubs will accelerate the energy transition by fostering innovation ecosystems, building capacities, and empowering local stakeholders. Employing a quadruple helix model, the ECHO consortium engaged academia, industry, government, and civil society in a collaborative framework. To achieve this, ECHO will: - Create a networking platform for continuous stakeholder collaboration, enabling resource sharing, knowledge exchange, and the dissemination of best practices. - Implement an expert collaboration program, injecting cutting-edge knowledge and practices to enhance the project's R&I potential. - Deliver tailored training programs to develop hard and soft skills across the energy community value chain. - Establish diverse pilot projects demonstrating advanced energy services, technology transfer, and solutions to energy poverty. These pilots will emphasize either direct citizen ownership (Renewable/Citizen Energy Communities) or models where service providers own assets while upholding democratic principles and strong community engagement. ECHO's focus on sustainable, scalable, and inclusive Energy Communities aligns with EU energy transition goals. By bridging regional strengths and empowering stakeholders, ECHO will contribute significantly to a resilient and equitable energy landscape.

PilotSTRATEGY focuses on advancing understanding of deep saline aquifer (DSA) resources for geological CO2 storage in five European industrial regions in Southern and Eastern Europe. DSAs have much promise and potential for CO2 storage, but despite their high potential storage capacity, they are not well studied. There is a need to increase confidence and maturity of understanding of these sites. PilotSTRATEGY will investigate DSA in detail in three regions of Southern Europe: Paris Basin (France), Lusitanian Basin (Portugal) and Ebro Basin (Spain). This will include acquisition of new data, detailed geo-characterisation, feasibility studies and preliminary design or pre-front end engineering and design studies. At the end of the project, the level of site characterisation in these three regions will be sufficient to allow a final investment decision to be made and for storage permitting and project approval to be obtained. In two further regions of Eastern Europe, West Macedonia (Greece) and Upper Silesia (Poland), PilotSTRATEGY will increase the maturity and confidence level of understanding of DSA storage resources, based on new available data, reprocessing of old data and new dynamic simulation studies. This will enable these regions to start planning to develop their storage resources. Recognising the social challenge of implementing geological CO2 storage, PilotSTRATEGY will take a systemic approach and analyse the factors that influence societal acceptance of storage sites, to develop methods for societal engagement. Regional stakeholders and the local public will be involved in developing recommendations and concepts as part of the pilot conceptualization and design. At the same time, PilotSTRATEGY will run a series of dialogues, “Talk with Authorities,” to support capacity building in local authorities and build policy makers’ awareness of geological CO2 storage, particularly the role of CCUS in just, net-zero transitions in all regions.

SERENDI-PV proposes innovations towards two main pillars: (1) increased lifetime, reliability, performance and profitability of PV generation; (2) utility-friendly high-penetration of the PV generation in the grids with improved stability, smart communication between stakeholders and increased knowledge of the PV fleet management. SERENDI-PV will develop advanced PV modelling, simulation and design tools, monitoring data analytics for fault diagnostic and improved O&M, as well as lab and field testing Quality Control (QC) equipment and procedures for better assessment of the reliability of PV components and systems. The innovations will be developed with particular attention to the new PV applications that are becoming increasingly relevant on the market, such as bifacial PV, floating PV and BIPV. SERENDI-PV will pave the way towards higher PV penetration through a better understanding of the PV installed capacity, smart digital models for energy and services communication exchange between system stakeholders, the development of mid-term, short-term forecasting, and nowcasting for PV system aggregations, new business models for PV added revenue, and the creation of a collaborative platform for modelling, data analytics, QC, databases and grid integration. The solutions will be developed on the data from nearly 500,000 PV installations monitored within the consortium, representing a wide range of system sizes and typologies, including large ground-mounted PV plants, mid-size commercial and industrial PV systems, and small-scale rooftop residential PV systems. The results will be achieved through an interdisciplinary approach combining the complementary expertise of the 19 different partners that take part in the consortium and that represent all the relevant stakeholders concerned by the topic of this project. The project will include several key demonstration activities in the operational environment corresponding to each one of the key innovations proposed