PRAETORIAN strategic goal is to increase the security and resilience of European CIs, facilitating the coordinated protection of interrelated CI against combined physical and cyber threats. To that end, the project will provide a multidimensional (economical, technological, policy, societal) yet installation-specific toolset comprising: (i) a Physical Situation Awareness system, (ii) a Cyber Situation Awareness system; (iii) a Hybrid Situation Awareness system, which will include digital twins of the infrastructure under protection; and (iv) a Coordinated Response system. The PRAETORIAN toolset will support the security managers of Critical Infrastructures (CI) in their decision making to anticipate and withstand potential cyber, physical or combined security threats to their own infrastructures and other interrelated CIs that could have a severe impact on their performance and/or the security of the population in their vicinity. The project will specifically tackle (i.e. prevent, detect, response and, in case of a declared attack, mitigate) human-made cyber and physical attacks or natural disasters affecting CIs. It will also address how an attack or incident in a specific CI can jeopardise the normal operation of other neighbouring/interrelated CIs, and how to make all of them more resilient, by predicting cascading effects and proposing a unified response among CIs and assisting First Responder teams. PRAETORIAN is a CI-led, user-driven project, which will demonstrate its results in three international pilot clusters –some of them cross border– involving 9 outstanding critical infrastructures: 2 international airports, 2 ports, 3 hospitals and 2 power plants.

Today, the heating sector is not on track toward achieving the IEA Net-Zero targets: it represents more than a third of the energy demand and it mainly relies on fossil fuels. District heating is recognized as a major solution allowing decarbonization of the heating sector. The integration of large-scale seasonal energy storage, compensating for the mismatch between supply and demand whilst ensuring the service, is key for a wide spread of district heating. USES4HEAT aims to demonstrate innovative, large-scale, seasonal thermal energy storage solutions enabling a future decarbonized and reliable heating supply. USES4HEAT demonstrates, at TRL8 and for a one-year test campaign, two innovative, cost-effective, large-scale, seasonal underground TES units to maximize the availability and resilience of heating supply while reducing energy losses and environmental impact. USES4HEAT seeks to demonstrate the storages as fully integrated units in commercial large-scale district heating networks and industrial waste heat recovery and fulfilling industrial thermal demand. In doing so, USES4HEAT also demonstrates six innovative key enabling components/technologies and their integration with seasonal storages: advanced drilling equipment and remotely controlled machines halving drilling times, innovative layered high-temperature borehole pipes, efficient groundwater heat pumps integrated with aquifer storages, hybrid solar panels and thermal solar collector, and accurate AI-based energy management tools. USES4HEAT will systematically demonstrate the effectiveness and techno-economic-social viability of innovative, large-scale, seasonal energy storages ensuring limited CAPEX, reduced environmental impact and energy losses, efficient integration in district heating and accumulation of various sources of heat, and granting reliable and decarbonized heating supply.