Waste heat recovery systems can offer significant energy savings and substantial greenhouse gas emission reductions. The waste heat recovery market is projected to exceed €45,0 billion by 2018, but for this projection to materialise and for the European manufacturing and user industry to benefit from these developments, technological improvements and innovations should take place aimed at improving the energy efficiency of heat recovery equipment and reducing installed costs. The overall aim of the project is to develop and demonstrate technologies and processes for efficient and cost effective heat recovery from industrial facilities in the temperature range 70°C to 1000°C and the optimum integration of these technologies with the existing energy system or for over the fence export of recovered heat and generated electricity if appropriate. To achieve this challenging aim, and ensure wide application of the technologies and approaches developed, the project brings together a very strong consortium comprising of RTD providers, technology providers and more importantly large and SME users who will provide demonstration sites for the technologies. The project will focus on two-phase innovative heat transfer technologies (heat pipes-HP) for the recovery of heat from medium and low temperature sources and the use of this heat for; a) within the same facility or export over the fence; b) for generation of electrical power; or a combination of (a) and (b) depending on the needs. For power generation the project will develop and demonstrate at industrial sites the Trilateral Flash System (TFC) for low temperature waste heat sources, 70°C to 200°C and the Supercritical Carbon Dioxide System (sCO2) for temperatures above 200°C. It is projected that these technologies used alone or in combination with the HP technologies will lead to energy and GHG emission savings well in excess of 15% and attractive economic performance with payback periods of less than 3,0 years.

"The Agrof-MM project in Agroforestry Education, Mediterranean & Mountains ereas, is aimed at farmers, future farmers, advisors and stakeholders in Agroforestry. This agricultural system has experienced a strong abandonment in the 20th century, to count today only a few million ha in Europe. Following the work of scientific research, development structures-agencies, and the experiments of some professionals, in recent years, agroforestry has met a true national and European recognition. Depending on the country, states or professional organizations and training actors reintroduce Agroforestry in the course of training and qualification in initial education (VET) and in adult training. Based on the results of scientific research, development structures and those of the ""farmer-researchers"", experimental courses were conducted in different countries, including FR, in the UK or in IT, on a small scale, as resources, trainers and available skills are scarce. It is on these four components: the results of scientific research, professional practice formalized training based on business situations, innovative teaching resources, the transfer from past AgroFE ToI project, the AgroF-MM project is based. In the partnership countries, the need for conversion and development is between 25 000 and 30 000 farms in the next 5 to7 years, which means training 25,000 to 30,000 farming managers (L4 to L6 by country) as well as the same number of workers and ‘’small farmers’’, L2-L3-L4 by country. But in order to achieve, to support these conversions, these profound changes in modes of practical production, we need counsellors-advisors, trainers, specialists and the level of human resources is low! The partners have identified training needs in the short term: These needs are on the one hand farmers and future farmers, adults and pupils - students, on the other hand, middle managers and teachers-counsellors-specialists. These requirements therefore relate to two levels of qualification L2-L3-L4 L5+/L6 and 3 types of learners (target groups): - Students (in VET) and adults, small farmers, future farmers and workers in farming on the one hand, mainly L2-L3, sometimes L4,- the farmers and future farmers (in larger farms) and middle management, mainly L3-L4-L5, sometimes L5,- the advisors-teachers-specialists, mainly level L5+L6,and the stakeholders of the oriention-pretraining tools and support systems, to attract learners, future farmers or to inform farmers and farming workers..In the short term, the project will address these 4 needs / three publics through a AgroF-MM training system established by the partners, partly based on the AgroFE Leonardo ToI project, the development of the EU AgForward RTD 7th research, the EURAF EU research association and its working groups, and the outcomes from the French RMT and Casdar programme. The project would be build on innovative teaching and training practices,( FR, GR BG), for instance on professional situations providing training and certification at the workplace (like SPS in France), access to recognized qualifications (NQF, EQF, ECVET, ECTS when possible), a process based on ‘’russian dolls’’, the certified and accredited inferior level giving access to the superior one, the certification at L4 giving access to L5 in the same domain.The training paths at the two planned levels have been developed with a common professional reference system, called the European Professional Referential in Agroforestry, EPRA, a common content, training framework for agroforestry called Core Content. In order to reduce the differences in knowledge and skills between the partners It has been necessary to develop a common professional vocabulary, the Theaurus, which did not exist, which required an important work with trainers- teacher-researchers, professionals, Thesaurus which represents an additional production of the project. A training framework adaptable to the specificities and training modalities of each of the partner countries has been designed and successfully implemented in six partner countries to train more than 150 operators and professionals in training 5j, more than 300 in training 1j and 70 trainers and advisors."

There is a compelling need of encouraging energy efficiency in buildings, enhance green technologies and promote advance thermal energy storage solutions. TESSe2b will enable the optimal use of renewable energy and provide one of the most advantageous solutions for correcting the mismatch that often occurs between the supply and demand of energy in residential buildings. The target of TESSe2b is to design, develop, validate and demonstrate a modular and low cost thermal storage technology based on solar collectors and highly efficient heat pumps for heating, cooling and domestic hot water (DHW) production. The idea is to develop advanced compact integrated PCM TES tanks exploiting RES (solar and geothermal) in an efficient manner coupled with enhanced PCM borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) that will take advantage of the increased underground thermal storage and maximize the efficiency of the ground coupled heat pumps (GCHP). The two TES tanks developed within TESSe2b project will be integrated with different PCM materials; (i) enhanced paraffin PCM, (ii) salt-hydrates PCM, while in both of them a highly efficient heat exchanger will be included. Even if the concept of phase change thermal stores has been demonstrated, TESSe2b project discriminates itself through incorporating; (i) PCM materials innovation, (ii) advanced energy management through self-learning model-based control system, (iii) enhanced PCM BHEs (v) compact modular design of thermal storage tank. Since the lifetime of TESSe2b solution is among the most critical factors determining its acceptability, reliability and success the on the long run, special emphasis will be given in the life-expectancy of the involved components.

Despite a number of software frameworks and reference architectures have made available for 5G enabling technologies, there is a clear gap to bridge towards 5G seamless application with a number of “vertical” sectors. Energy vertical represents undoubtedly one of the most significant “test cases” for 5G enabling technologies, due to the need of addressing a huge range of very diverse requirements to deal with across a variety of applications (stringent capacity for smart metering/AMI versus latency for supervisory control and fault localization).However, to effectively support energy utilities along their transition towards more decentralized renewable-oriented systems, several open issues still remain as to 5G networks management automation, security, resilience, scalability and portability. To face these issues, NRG-5 will research and develop a novel 5G PPP-compliant software framework specifically tailored to the energy domain, which combines i) trusted, scalable and lock-in free plug ‘n’ play support for a variety of constrained devices; ii) 5G devices’ abstractions to demonstrate mMTC, uMTC and xMBB communications coupled with partially distributed, trusted, end-to-end security and MCM to enable secure, scalable and energy efficient communications; iii) extended Mobile Edge Computing (xMEC) micro-clouds to reduce backhaul load, increase the overall network capacity and reduce delays, while facilitating the deployment of generic MTC-related NFVs and utility-centric VNFs; iv) an extended 5G ETSI-MANO predictive analytics framework to support automated, dynamic, elastic VNF reconfiguration. Extensive lab based validation will be complemented with real life demonstrations in two pilot sites (Italy, France) where proof-of-concept implementations for 5G-enabled electricity and gas distribution network optimized management will be offered, while offering support to 5G PPP phase III projects via demonstrating high replication potential towards other verticals.