Towards a dominant renewable energy generation scenario in the EU, it is key to modernise transmission systems for an efficient transport of the energy produced. The deployment of HVDC systems plays a crucial role in enabling electricity transmission over long distances with minimal losses. There is the need to bring new cable technologies that can increase the life cycle of future HVDC systems, and longer reach, more precise, easy to install sensor-based technologies to analyse cable status and locate potential faults. EasyDC-FOS project will commit to demonstrating a new generation of HV cable systems with optimised energy transport capability and longer life period, due to the use of an alternative XLPE insulation material, paired with the development of a series of smart tools for monitoring ageing and efficient fault detection in transmission networks, and reaching a TRL5 by the involvement of 3 demonstrators, 1 test bench and 2 real-world use cases, in different EU countries. This will be achieved by the: 1) optimisation of insulation materials for HVDC cables with operating temperature over 90ºC; 2) development of predictive models of physics and ageing behaviour of new cable system in response to thermal, acoustic and electric field stress stimulus; 3) prototyping of a set of fibre-based DTS, DAS, point vibration, and PD monitoring systems for long-distance cable corridors; and 4) integration into a cybersecure Edge Infrastructure that will allow real-time monitoring of cable conditions, as well as immediate response from TSOs, satisfying the KPIs in terms of system efficiency and stability, lifetime and thermal capacity assessment, and the accuracy of the sensors. For that purpose, EasyDC-FOS is bringing together a wide experienced consortium led by LMK, involving leading industrial technology developers of cables systems, a cable OEM, academic institutions, two TSOs, a key sector association, and sustainability and management experts at European level.

IoT developers face a very fragmented landscape made of very different devices, from bare metal devices with few KB of RAM and limited or no security protection to devices equipped with powerful support for AI and with built-in hardware (HW) to implement Root of Trust (RoT) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). Such different devices coexist, and it is an open challenge to guarantee an acceptable level of security across the whole system to avoid “easy” entry points for attackers. The complexity is further exacerbated by the existence of many HW platforms, general purpose but also domain specific, each implementing proprietary instances of RoT and TEE that prevent or make it very difficult for applications and security services to interoperate. CROSSCON aims at addressing all these issues by designing a new open, flexible, highly portable and vendor independent IoT security stack that can run across a variety of different edge devices and multiple HW platforms to offer a consistent security baseline across an entire IoT system. A high-level assurance is guaranteed by the formal verification of the stack specifications. CROSSCON stack offers a unified set of trusted APIs to the layers above. It is modular and among all the security features it offers is possible to configure only the ones needed depending on the underlined HW and firmware. It leverages the security features already implemented in the layers below. In case such security features are missing, like in bare metal devices, the stack offers an entire TEE implementation suitable for such devices. As devices are getting more powerful and use cases more complex, there is the need to add new trusted services as building blocks to implement security at the higher levels, such as protection of the models given in input to ML engines embedded in HW or support for biometrics and template protections. CROSSCON provides the open specifications of the stack along with an open-source reference implementation.

Even if significant progress has been made towards the Twin Transition, the recent energy crisis revealed the EU energy system’s vulnerability and dependence on external energy sources and highlighted the need for intensifying the integration of RES in electricity, transport and building (heating) sectors. To achieve on this, the energy system shall transform from a centralised/fossil-fuel-based to an energy efficient, RES-based and interdependent system, operating with a high degree of flexibility offered by distributed assets. ODEON is conceived under the principle that this can only be realized through the creation of an inclusive ecosystem of stakeholders characterized a mesh of Data, Intelligence, Service and Market flows, jointly enabling the resilient operation of the energy system under increased RES integration and distributed flexibility. ODEON introduces a sound, reliable, scalable and openly accessible federated technological framework (i.e. ODEON Cloud-Edge Data and Intelligence Service Platform and corresponding Federated Energy Data Spaces. AI Containers, Smart Data/AIOps orchestrators) for the delivery of a wealth of services addressing the complete life-cycle of Data/AIOps and their smart spawn in federated environments and infrastructures across the continuum. It will integrate highly reliable and secure federated data management, processing, sharing and intelligence services, enabling the energy value chain actors and 3rd parties to engage in data/intelligence sharing, towards the delivery of innovative data-driven and intelligence-powered energy services in accordance to the objectives set by the DoEAP. ODEON results will be extensively validated in 5 large-scale demonstration sites in Greece, Spain, France, Denmark and Ireland involving all required value chain actors, diverse assets, heterogeneous grid and market contexts, and multi-variate climatic and socio-economic characteristics to support its successful replication and market uptake.

Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to greatly influence the European economy. It was forecasted that IoT would bring revenue of approximately 2,133 billion U.S. dollars in Western Europe by 2020. Strong pressure by keen investors and managers wanting to unlock the value of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is leading to exponential growth, but the growth is happening too fast given inherent complexity of implementations. In this sense, with IoT there are appearing solutions for very critical sectors, where security is a must. Health solutions, Banking, etc.. cannot fail, and IoT solutions should be ready for this level of service. With the available tools, IT managers have no option but to take a patch-work approach that is costly, time consuming, causing fragmentation and interoperability issues, while exposing major security vulnerabilities that are left at the mercy of cyber attackers. In fact, many companies lack the skills required to handle the complexity and are burdened by heavy costs of security consultants or software needed to ‘fix’ the vulnerabilities after installation, if and when detected. In the emerging fast-growing market, Barbara project is an IoT Open Source Operating System and Management Platform focused on enhancing security for connected IoT devices. The market for IIoT devices itself is huge, worth 457 US Billions in 2020. TipTap Labs has developed Barbara, a solution that directly addresses the user pains and challenges of IIoT deployment, delivering a new operating system and management platform specially designed for connected devices, with a core focus on security designed into the system. The team has years of experience in security and IIoT implementations, understanding real user needs and industry trends. Barbara has the potential to completely disrupt the market, generating enormous value for industries and the company itself.