Collective projects

The Electrical Power and Energy System (EPES) is of key importance to the economy, as all other domains rely on the availability of electricity, hence a power outage can have direct impact on the availability of other services (e.g. transport, finance, communication, water supply) where backup power is not available or the power restoration time goes beyond the backup autonomy.

The digital infrastructure, upon which other sectors, businesses and society at large critically depend, must be resilient and trustworthy, and must remain secure despite the escalating cyber-threats. New technologies and their novel combinations require innovative ways to implement security measures and to make new security-related assumptions, identifying "zero-day" or potential unknown vulnerabilities, forecasting new threats (plus their cascading effects) and emerging attacks, and managing cyber risks.

In critical vertical sectors/domains, cybersecurity technologies deployed in several application domains should be aligned to the specific domain needs, linking the demand and supply sides for such cyber technologies.

Climate change is likely to make it harder to address inter alia poverty, disease, food and water insecurity in Europe. Rising temperatures and changing precipitation will affect the availability of food, energy and water, leading to likely increased volatility in food prices, and heightened regional tensions, affecting international stability and security. An increased frequency and/or intensity of extreme weather events may adversely affect human, animal and plant health, disrupt the flow of natural resources and commodities, and threaten infrastructure globally.

Specific Challenge

To create a world-class pan-European High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure and to provide state-of-the-art services accessible by users independently of their location, by pooling, integrating and rationalising the HPC resources at EU level.

Scope

Proposals should address all the following activities:

Specific Challenge

The transition to a low-carbon energy system poses a unique set of policy, technological and scientific challenges, changes the fundamental nature of the interrelations between all actors in our societies (from energy incumbents to regulators and citizens), and requires the engagement of all stakeholders.

The fast growth of the energy production from renewable energy sources offers new and economically attractive opportunities for decarbonising local energy systems on the mainland (e.g. isolated villages, small cities, urban districts, rural areas with weak or non-existing grid connections). It is also a technological and financial challenge for the electricity network. Decarbonisation and energy savings should result from an optimal combination of these energy sources.

Energy prices on geographical island are typically 100% to 400% higher than on the mainland; therefore the large-scale deployment of local renewable energy sources brings economic benefits and, at the same time, contributes to decarbonise the energy system of the island, reduce greenhouse gases emissions and improve, or at least not deteriorate, air quality.

Scope

The proposed solutions will contribute to at least 4 of the following objectives:

According to the JRC Smart Grid Projects Outlook 2014[1], the majority of cooperation takes place between organisations from a limited number of Member States while 15 analysed countries (NO, CH, IE, PL, HU, SK, LT, RO, LV, HR, BG, LU, CY, EE, MT) account for less than 5 % of the R&I funds altogether.