IANOS brings together two Lighthouse (LH) islands (Terceira-PT, Ameland-NL), and three Fellow islands (FI) (Lambedusa-IT, Bora-Bora-FR, Nisyros-GR), all sharing a common vision of decarbonizing their energy systems and be energy independent until 2050. Thirty-four (33) strongly experienced partners from nine (9) European countries, join forces to deliver smart technological, economic and social innovations, providing systemic optimization starting from an Energy Community-centric approach. IANOS adopts an Island Energy Transition Strategy built around three (3) Island Energy Transition Tracks that focus on: a) Energy efficiency and grid support for extremely high RES penetration, b) Decarbonization through electrification and support from non-emitting fuels, c) Empowering Local Energy Communities (LEC). Through IANOS an impressive repository of elements (technologies, tools, methods) will be demonstrated in the two LH islands and within nine (8) carefully defined Use-Cases (UCs) that will lead to: a reduction of fossil fuel consumption by 326.4 GWh/y, an increase in RES utilization by 26.5 GWh/y, increase accuracy of vRES forecasts by >10% and reduce energy bills of end-users by >15%. In total, 900 participants (prosumers/consumers) will be involved in LECs by the end of IANOS. Elements to be demonstrated include: an iVPP operative orchestration toolkit, smart energy routers, hybrid transformers, flywheel storage, biobased batteries, heat batteries, tidal kite, and the IANOS Energy Planning and Transition Suite (IEPT). The replication potential of IANOS UCs will be evaluated in the three FIs. Due to their current local energy mix, Terceira and Ameland can particularly act as LHs for geothermal and hydrogen-centered island economies, respectively. To reach all these goals, a total of 121.6M€ will be invested by the 2 LH ecosystems, while another 60.4M€ will be fuelled by the 6 FI ecosystems during IANOS (until 2025).

The transformation of Europe’s energy system creates both challenges and opportunities for the hydropower sector. Hydropower needs to seek out value within the electricity market aligned with other sources of renewable and sustainable energy, whilst operating and building plants in environmentally sensitive and acceptable ways. The call H2020 LC-SC3-CC-4-2018: “Support to sectorial fora”, item 2: “bringing together stakeholders of the hydropower sector in a forum” provides a unique opportunity to bring together the hydropower community and to develop a Research and Innovation Agenda, and a Technology Roadmap mapping implementation of that agenda. These will support implementation of research and innovation for new hydropower technologies and innovative mitigation measures. The HYDROPOWER-EUROPE project delivers these objectives through an extensive programme of stakeholder consultation. The consortium brings together six different associations and networks spanning the whole research and industry value chain. These networks, along with representatives of civil society and European and national authorities, will form the initial stakeholder consultation base. Through an extensive, cyclic programme of consultation – both online and through various regional, European and International workshops – research needs and priorities will be established supporting development of the Hydropower Research and Innovation Agenda. The consultation process also facilitates discussion around issues and perceptions affecting the implementation of hydropower in Europe. Conclusions from this will underpin development of the Technology Roadmap, addressing any issues affecting uptake of the research and innovation agenda. Finally, the HYDROPOWER-EUROPE project will also consider ways in which the forum, established through this initiative, may become sustainable beyond the 3-year project programme, so supporting uptake and implementation of the research and innovation agenda.

The aim of the PV-Prosumers4Grid project is to develop and implement innovative self-consumption and aggregation concepts and business models for PV prosumers that will help integrating sustainable and competitive electricity from PV in the electricity system. The benefits of the PV-Prosumers4Grid action will be therefore threefold: • To identify the necessary regulatory changes and the business opportunities for PV prosumers and grid operators • To further support the deployment PV systems for electricity generation with focus on physical and financial grid interactions • To provide PV Prosumers (households and industries) with competitive and sustainable electricity Innovative self-consumption and aggregation concepts and business models for PV generation are extremely needed nowadays. At the time being many EU Member States have drastically reduced measures to further support the development of the RES sector, even though several projects have clearly demonstrated the need to maintain the policies to support RES until when a consolidated competitiveness has been achieved. Such competetiveness for variable RES will depend on the ability of the existing or future electricity markets to provide them with adequate revenues, whatever the size of the plant. In addition, the variable aspect of PV doesn’t allow them by nature to bid on the market at chosen times, with a possible and already visible impact on the market prices. The consequence could be that under such conditions, their competitiveness will become more difficult to achieve unless the consumers could become more responsive to price signals and allow to displace the load. Moreover, the new state aid guidelines published in April 2014 by the European Commission are pushing for further integration of renewable sources into the electricity markets, which will require from RES to cope with market integration, more constraining grid codes and balancing regulations.

The ambitious plan for an energy transition in Europe now seeks to achieve a low-carbon climate-resilient future in a safe and cost-effective way, serving as an example worldwide. In many European countries, the phase out of nuclear and coal generation has started with a transition to new renewable sources comprising mainly of solar and wind for electricity generation. However, solar and wind are variable energy sources and difficult to align with demand. Hydropower which strongly contributed during the last century to industrial development and welfare, provides high flexibility and storage services required for ensuring energy security and delivering more solar and wind power onto the grid. Hydropower has all the characteristics to serve as an excellent catalyst for a successful energy transition. Building from this extensive programme of consultation, the Hydropower Europe Forum (https://hydropower-europe.eu/) has developed from 2018 to 2022 a Research and Innovation Agenda (RIA) as well as a Strategic Industry Roadmap (SIR). The Consortium is particularly motivated (1) to integrate its RIA and SIR into the Strategic Energy Technology (SET) Plan roadmap establishing links with national authorities and (2) to consolidate its strong networks into a sustainable association serving not only the hydropower sector but the whole renewable energy sector contributing towards the European Green Deal. Built on the more than 600 stakeholders representing all sectors, who actively participated through the Hydropower Europe Forum, ETIP HYDROPOWER will further align and coordinate the industry RIA and SIR strategies to provide consensus-based strategic advice to the SET Plan covering analysis of market opportunities and R&I funding needs, biodiversity protection and ecological continuity. Another goal is, in one with Europe and the latest EU climate and energy related policies, deepening the understanding of innovation barriers and exploitation of research results.

SKILLBILL’s overall objective is to develop a large and strong foundation for the growth and acceleration of renewable energy’s deployment, thanks to engaging with stakeholders of the whole chain, diffusing scientific culture and skilling multi-level workers. The basic idea underling the project is that the knowledge should be diffused at several different levels and qualitatively appropriate both to train the adequate number of workers and to increase RES awareness and to reach a more social and inclusive Europe The project aims at creating several pathways to induce target groups to get interested or involved in RES besides their initial level of education and their working position: the technological RES potential can be reached by increasing hard and soft skills of potential users and stakeholders, developing interest in the topic and having clear and appropriate approaches, such as tools and learning modules using suitable language. It’s important, beside the creation of instruments for the upskilling and reskilling of workers, technician and designers, to have awareness modules for unspecific public in order to fight against ignorance, fake news, gender gap and the phenomenon of functional illiteracy: it is widely documented that lifelong suitable learning process is the fundamental driver to support the development, maintenance and update of skills. SKILLBILL proposes concrete actions to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy at different levels: 1. Stakeholder community engagement 2. Knowledge sharing and peer learning 3. Skilling, upskilling, reskilling SKILLBILL will i) analyse and involve all the interested parts in open discussion using adequate language; ii) create several different pathways to increase skills after having mapped knowledge gap and without gender prejudice; iii) develop and implement innovative learning method; vi) evaluate the work performed.