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.

The SWS-HEATING project will develop an innovative seasonal thermal energy storage (STES) unit with a novel storage material and creative configuration, i.e. a sorbent material embedded in a compact multi-modular sorption STES unit. This will allow to store and shift the harvested solar energy available abundantly during the summer to the less sunny and colder winter period thus covering a large fraction of heating and domestic hot water demand in buildings. The targeted benefit of this next generation solar heating technology is to reach and overcome a solar fraction of 60% in central/north Europe, reaching 80% in the sunnier south of Europe, with a compact and high-performing STES system at low cost, realising solar-active houses throughout EU. The SWS-heating system is based on a multi-modular sorption seasonal thermal energy storage (STES) unit, using novel sorbent materials of Selective Water Sorbents (SWS) family characterised by superior heat storage density compared to the state of the art, making it possible to drastically decrease the storage volume with negligible thermal losses. These materials are employed in a sorption module with dedicated heat exchangers. Solar heat is provided to the storage modules by high-efficiency evacuated tube solar thermal collectors. Intensive research activities will deal with an advanced vacuum combi-storage tank, with the aim to further minimise thermal losses. A smart and adaptive control will be developed for efficiently managing heat supply and demand sides, including advanced features aiming at user-friendliness. A building prototype will be commissioned including the SWS-heating system, which will be tested and validated in Germany and Sweden and proof all challenging objectives. The project also includes dissemination and communication activities to ensure outreach of its results. Moreover, exploitation activities include long-term deployment path development through a technology roadmap.

The main goal of VULKANO is the retrofitting of two types of industrial furnaces, namely preheating and melting, applied on three energy–intensive sectors (steel, ceramic and aluminium) with a huge number of potential users in Europe. Thus, this project aims to design, implement and validate an advanced retrofitting integrated solution to increase the energy and environmental efficiency in existing industrial furnaces fed with NG; through the combined implementation of new solutions based on high temperature phase change materials, new refractories, optimised co-firing of NG and syngas from biomass or process gas, an advanced monitoring and control system and an holistic in-house predictive tool. All together will achieve a 20% increase in the energy efficiency of furnaces. On top of that, the realistic and powerful holistic tool will also able to optimize the integration of the solution with upstream/downstream perspective, following a life cycle and cost thinking. This predictive tool will support plant operators and decision makers to select most suitable retrofitting strategy for their plants, fostering overall efficiency, increase in competitiveness and circular economy and reducing the environmental impact of the product value chain from an LCA and LCC perspective. The retrofitting solutions will be tested at TRL 7 in two real facilities in Ceramic (Spain) and Steel (Slovenia) sector, validating the replicability of such solutions in a third sector (Aluminium-Turkey). VULKANO addresses the main challenge when facing furnaces retrofitting, which is tackling the problem from an overall and cost thinking perspective, which will enable overcoming the barriers for energy efficiency improvements. A well balanced consortium formed by end-users, technology solutions providers and research organizations ensures successful achievement of objectives, which will allow a wide spreading replication strategy towards furnaces retrofitting towards modern and efficient designs

Buildings play a significant role in the global energy balance. Typically, they account for 20-30% of the total primary energy requirement of industrialized countries, 40% in EU. Applying the proposed integrated RES to buildings is an important application for wider integration and deployment of renewable energy and to achieving our binding EU targets of at least a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 2030, compared to 1990 and at least 27% of renewable energy in EU. The IDEAS project will create an innovative building integrated renewable energy system (RES) which will cost effectively exceed current RES efficiencies, generating electricity, heat and cooling and optimised for multifamily, public and commercial buildings in different climatic conditions. The research aim is to create a novel low-cost building integrated RES maximizing the output tuneable for different climatic conditions through novel luminescent and geometric concentrator techniques leading to current solar system efficiencies being exceeded electrically. Thermally enhancement will be achieved using enhanced organic phase change materials (PCM) with a passive biomimetic heat transfer mechanism for heat storage and discharge. An electrically driven multi-source heat pumpHP system will then use the main energy sources at building scale (waste heat from the system, air and ground), to provide the input to an integrated underfloor heating and hot water system, and to manage the thermal energy storage. This building integrated RES will use advanced control techniques to maximize performance and electrical and thermal/cooling self-sufficiency in the building. The technology will be optimized and demonstrated for use in multi-family residential buildings, commercial and public buildings.