Batteries have been identified as an important technology to guide the clean-energy transition. Its presence in the automotive and energy storage industry is well-established and forecasts show its incoming market uptake. However, the current BMS of FLBs lack interoperability features, resulting in a time-consuming, expensive, and non-standardized reconfiguration process for SLB adaptation. These drawbacks complicate FLB repurposing for SLB applications, like ESS. The BIG LEAP project focuses on developing solutions for the SLBs BMS and its reconfiguration process. Technology breakthroughs will be made in its BMS, as a new three-layer architecture will be designed to ensure interoperability, safety, and reliability. It will be complemented with an adaptable ESS design to ensure BMS integration and expand the SLB's potential applications. Additionally, the BIG LEAP project intends to optimize the battery reconfiguration process by making it cost-effective, faster, and standardized. The methodology for the development of these innovations includes the collection of EV, maritime E-Vessel, and ESS batteries that will be dismantled and the data collected will serve as the basis for the BMS architecture development. It will contain adaptable SoX algorithms for accurate battery measurement, a DT for real-time monitoring, and a standardization roadmap. The new BMS will be integrated into the batteries, alongside the ESS and will be tested in three demo sites. Two physical demos will be in Paris and Prague, and a virtual demo will be in Morocco. They aim to validate the novel BMS and ESS, proving their optimization and interoperability. The BIG LEAP innovation includes a multidisciplinary consortium, a strong business case, and an Environmental Impact assessment. All with the intention of accelerating its market uptake with a cost-effective solution, positively impacting the European economy through the battery value chain and tracing its sustainable benefits.

In RETRIEVE we aim to combine PV upstream value chain organizations with beyond state-of-the-art recycling processes and techniques to improve circularity within the PV sector. RETRIEVE targets the upcycling of the components of the End of Life (EoL) solar panels, enhancing the material quality to meet current requirements for re-introduction into the PV value chain. RETRIEVE will increase the circularity and minimize the environmental impact of the PV industry by developing and demonstrating cost effective recycling technologies for the different components of a solar module; recycle glass to current PV specifications, purify production waste and EoL silicon to solar grade quality, recover silver and heavy metals, and polymer valorization with carbon capture. The final goal is to demonstrate a closed-loop recycling process where recycled glass as well as silicon is re-used in state-of-the-art solar module production, turning the EoL PV panels into sources of new raw materials for the PV manufacture industry. In addition, future PV waste streams for EoL and production waste will be forecasted, and the market potential will be evaluated. By lowering the financial burden of material recovery and increasing the value after recovery, RETRIEVE makes the overall module recycling process more profitable, and the project opens new paths for commercialization. Business cases and market introduction strategies will be developed for a selection of the processes and products.

The Internet-of-Energy (IoE) is a revolutionary paradigm towards achieving the EU’s zero-carbon goal through enabling intelligent and automated energy management across the entire lifecycle of energy planning, storage, distribution, and maintenance. Operating in highly complex environments characterised by intermittent and volatile renewable energy generation, dynamic energy demands, large-scale distributed energy integration, and stringent resilience and security requirements, IoE faces fundamental challenges in constructing accurate and real-time digital representation, securing Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, optimising energy management, and diagnosing device faults and failures. To address these challenges, SAILING aims to establish a multidisciplinary network of world-leading academic and industrial partners to create a ground-breaking smart system for energy management and fault diagnosis powered by innovative digital twin and secure AI technologies. Specifically, SAILING will pioneer transformative research and innovations, including: 1) AI-driven high-fidelity digital twin for IoE digital representation, 2) Secure and reliable AI for IoE empowered by Blockchain and adversarial machine learning, 3) Intelligent and scalable predictive energy management and optimisation, and 4) Deep learning-based rapid fault detection and accurate failure prediction. SAILING will train 12 Early-Stage Researchers across sectors and disciplines in the novel concepts and methodologies of smart IoE, equip them with sought-after professional and transferable skills, foster broader perspectives, and cultivate them to become future leaders in IoE. Through cutting-edge research and multidisciplinary cross-sectoral collaborations, SAILING will drive scientific breakthroughs with innovative digital twin and secure AI technologies for realising reliable, resilient, and energy-efficient smart IoE, and revolutionising the energy sector for a more sustainable and cleaner future.

EcoSolar envisions an integrated value chain to manufacture and implement solar panels in the most ecologic way by maximising resource efficiency, taking into account reuse of materials during production and repurposing solar panel components at end of life stage. EcoSolar will demonstrate that during the lifetime of a solar electricity producing field, individual panels can be monitored, allowing to identify defaulting panels at an early stage, replacing or repairing them and thus to increase the overall energy yield. In WP1, SINTEF&Norsun will work on recovery & reuse during silicon ingot crystallisation, addressing recovery of argon purge gas and work with Steuler on reusable crucibles. In WP2 Garbo will recover Si-kerf-loss during wafering, and with SINTEF work on potential reuse applications, like as Si-feedstock in crystallisation processes, or as resource in crucible manufacturing or lithium ion battery production. In WP3, ISC&SoliTek will look into potential for re-using process water; reducing material resources, like chemicals and silver, by smarter solar cell design, more efficient processes and recovery and reuse of chemicals; AIMEN will develop solar cell monitoring and repair for inline processing in an industrial plant, to enable remanufacturing. In WP4 Apollon will use a module design that results in reduced bill of materials, enables remanufacturing and reuse of components from modules that showed failures after assembly or have been identified as malfunctioning in operating PV installations, based on integrated diagnosis techniques for the detection of failure modes. bifa will collect data from all previous WPs to assess environmental impact of the intended innovations (WP5). Bifa will identify waste streams that are costly and hard to recycle and find opportunities to repurpose those waste products. BCC will disseminate the results and will support the partners with the exploitation and replication potential of the results (WP6).

The main vision of CABRISS project is to develop a circular economy mainly for the photovoltaic, but also for electronic and glass industry. It will consist in the implementation of: (i) recycling technologies to recover In, Ag and Si for the sustainable PV technology and other applications; (ii) a solar cell processing roadmap, which will use Si waste for the high throughput, cost-effective manufacturing of hybrid Si based solar cells and will demonstrate the possibility for the re-usability and recyclability at the end of life of key PV materials. The developed Si solar cells will have the specificity to have a low environmental impact by the implementation of low carbon footprint technologies and as a consequence, the technology will present a low energy payback (about 1 year). The originality of the project relates to the cross-sectorial approach associating together different sectors like the Powder Metallurgy (fabrication of Si powder based low cost substrate), the PV industry (innovative PV Cells) and the industry of recycling (hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy) with a common aim : make use of recycled waste materials (Si, In and Ag). CABRISS focuses mainly on a photovoltaic production value chain, thus demonstrating the cross-sectorial industrial symbiosis with closed-loop processes.