Our world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges. Keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5°C implies a mandatory drop in CO2 emissions. Against this backdrop, the EC has issued the European Green Deal: an ambitious plan towards a fully sustainable economy, including aviation. With one million species endangered, biodiversity restoration is another key issue. Once aviation has recovered from the COVID pandemic effects, global air traffic as a major enabler of connectivity and economic growth will resume and keep increasing. This emphasizes the challenge of reducing the environmental impact of the air transportation sector as a whole. OLGA partners (airports, airline, handler, industry, research, SMEs) unite a wealth of expertise to contribute to solving this complex challenge: efficient and carbon neutral airport and airline operations, sustainable logistics, smart energy & mobility, intermodality for passengers and freight, emission/air quality assessments, green construction and circular end-of-life solutions. Sustainable Aviation Fuels supply chains will be integrated in conventional jet fuel infrastructure. Complementary types of low-emission mobilities, electric ground support equipment, hydrogen infrastructure and reduced carbon airside operations will be demonstrated. OLGA will achieve significant quantified advances already within the first three years, ready for exploitation by partners. This will lead to proven CO2 reduction, air quality improvement and biodiversity preservation with involvement of the entire sector's value chain. Sustainable impacts will be realised on societal, environmental and economic levels at local, national and EU scale. OLGA will have a duration of 60 months, requesting a 25 MEuros grant. OLGA's airports are uniquely positioned to showcase the environmental innovations, while the airports of Zagreb and Cluj will prove scalability and EU-wide applicability.

H2Haul will develop and demonstrate a total of 16 new heavy-duty (26–44t) hydrogen fuel cell trucks in real-world commercial operations. The project includes two major European truck manufacturers (IVECO and VDL), who will build on existing small-scale prototyping activities to develop new zero-emission trucks tailored to the needs of European customers, mainly in large supermarket fleets. The vehicles will be standardised as far as possible to help encourage the development of the European supply chain. New high-capacity hydrogen refuelling stations will be installed to provide reliable, low carbon hydrogen supplies to the trucks. Most of the stations will be publicly accessible and this project will thus support the uptake of a broader range of hydrogen-fuelled vehicles. The vehicles and infrastructure will be thoroughly tested via an extended trial with the high-profile end users over several years. The comprehensive data monitoring and analysis tasks will ensure that the technical, economic, and environmental performance of the hardware is assessed, and that the business case for further deployment of heavy-duty fuel cell trucks is developed. The scope and ambition of this innovative project will create a range of valuable information that will be disseminated widely amongst truck operators, representatives of the retail sector, policy makers, and the broader hydrogen industry. Hence, H2Haul will validate the ability of hydrogen fuel cell trucks to provide zero-emission mobility in heavy-duty applications and lay the foundations for commercialisation of this sector in Europe during the 2020s.

EMPOWER addresses in full the expected outcome and scope of the HORIZON-CL5-2022-D5-01-08 topic by delivering two flexible, modular, and scalable zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles (ZE HDV) belonging to the VECTO vehicle group 9 (6×2 rigid trucks), with a gross vehicle weight equal or above 40 tons. One vehicle is powered by a Fuel Cell (FC) system and has a driving range of 750 km, while the other is powered by a battery-electric powertrain, and has a driving range of 400 km. Both vehicles will be delivered at TRL 8 by the end of the project (end of 2026) and are expected to approach the market by 2029. Within its technical activities, EMPOWER will: • design, implement and deliver technology bricks: (1) a modular vehicle system architecture, (2) a modular high voltage architecture, (3) a modular low-voltage E/E architecture, (4) a FC system with high reliability and extended operational lifetime with a modular energy storage, (5) a highly efficient e-axle, (6) an optimised thermal- and energy management, (7) an optimised HVAC system featuring CO2 as refrigerant and infrared heating panels, (8) an electrified distributed braking system, (9) digital twin models of the demonstrators, (10) an innovative Human Vehicle Interface for optimised control of the vehicle systems, featuring Vehicle-to-Grid communication and eco-routing, (11) a fleet management system for the integration of ZE HDV into the fleet, (12) an overall LCA and TCO assessment, and (13) the operation of a green hydrogen infrastructure for ZE HDV. • demonstrate the driving range and real-world operation performance of the two ZE HDV in five different long-haul and regional distribution use-cases, including cross-border corridors between different European member states. The modular and scalable EMPOWER technology is transferable to VECTO vehicle groups 4, 5, and 10, and it is designed to achieve the total cost of operation parity against the conventional 2020 baseline diesel truck by 2030, targeting a production volume above 10,000 vehicles/year.

Hydrogen Mobility Europe 2 (H2ME 2) brings together action in 8 European countries to address the innovations required to make the hydrogen mobility sector truly ready for market. The project will perform a large-scale market test of hydrogen refuelling infrastructure, passenger and commercial fuel cell electric vehicles operated in real-world customer applications and demonstrate the system benefits generated by using electrolytic hydrogen solutions in grid operations. H2ME 2 will increase the participation of European manufacturers into the hydrogen sector, and demonstrate new vehicles across a range of platforms, with increased choice: new cars (Honda and Mercedes), new vans (range extended vehicles from Renault/Symbio and Renault/Nissan/Intelligent Energy) and a new medium sized urban delivery truck (Renault Trucks/Symbio). H2ME 2 develops an attractive proposition around range extended vehicles and supports a major roll-out of 1,000 of these vehicles to customers in France, Germany, Scandinavia and the UK. 1,316 new hydrogen fuelled vehicles will be deployed in total, trebling the existing fuel cell fleet in Europe. H2ME 2 will establish the conditions under which electrolytic refuelling stations can play a beneficial role in the energy system, and demonstrate the acquisition of real revenues from provision of energy services for aggregated electrolyser-HRS systems at a MW scale in both the UK and France. This has the further implication of demonstrating viable opportunities for reducing the cost of hydrogen at the nozzle by providing valuable energy services without disrupting refuelling operations. H2ME 2 will test 20 new HRS rigorously at high level of utilisation using the large vehicle deployment. The loading of stations by the end of the project is expected to average 20% of their daily fuelling capacity, with some stations exceeding 50% or more. This will test the HRS to a much greater extent than has been the case in previous projects.

HyQuality Europe aims to understand hydrogen fuel quality across Europe and enable HRS operators to provide assurance that their fuel is fulfilling the required quality standards. The project is designed to understand hydrogen fuel quality in Europe by carrying out a representative mass market investigation of European HRS hydrogen quality, collecting 300 spot samples of both light-duty (700 bar, 60 g/s flow rate) from at least 100 HRS in at least 13 European countries. These samples will be analysed by the leading hydrogen analysis laboratories in Europe, and the results will be published in an open-source database. The results will provide the data to clarify the Occurrence Class of different European HRS impurities, from which HRS operators will be able to form a cost-effective risk assessment quality assurance plan instead of taking an expensive prescriptive approach. By facilitating HRS operators to provide low cost quality assurance the project will lower the price of hydrogen at the nozzle and subsequently increase consumer confidence, increase the incentive for fleet operators to switch to hydrogen vehicles, and enable the widespread deployment of hydrogen vehicles and refuelling infrastructure. The project will also advance upon state-of-the-art hydrogen quality assurance by instrumenting 3 HRS with online analysers, and develop testing capacity by laboratory proficiency testing 10 European hydrogen analysis laboratories in line with ISO standards. Finally, the occurrence of a minimum of 4 new impurities will be investigated using wide scope analytical techniques. The project will proactively seek to influence the development of ISO standards and future research on this crucial topic through the involvement of leading researchers in the field.