Fuelling a green Horizon 2020
Europe has binding renewable energy targets for 2020 and many of the technologies needed are either on the shelf or close to market. However, renewable energy technologies require immediate support to demonstrate their practical implementation, and, in the longer-term (by 2050), next generation technologies are needed. Leading R&D is therefore needed to achieve the necessary breakthroughs.
EUREC acts as the voice of renewable energy research in Europe and represents European renewable energy research centres. Vinicius Valente, communications officer at the agency, explains the background to the association, the importance of the SET Plan and energy research in Horizon 2020.
EUREC
Innovation is a complex and often little understood process. Ensuring that the EU creates the conditions that are conducive to innovation is a key aim of EUREC, a leading association of research centres and university departments active in the area of renewable energy. EUREC brings together 43 research centres, renowned for their expertise in the field of renewable energy, covering all types of renewable energy and associated technologies, for example storage and grids. Based in Brussels, the association’s central purpose is to promote and support the development of innovative technologies and human resources to enable a prompt transition to a sustainable energy system.
EUREC’s members cover the spectrum of activities across the innovation chain from basic research to pilot and demonstration projects. Part of its recent success, using this knowledge, has been to strengthen the links between research and industry by facilitating innovation and technology transfer. To this end, EUREC has acquired several strategic projects co-financed by the EU, including co-ordinating the European Technology Platform on Renewable Heating and Cooling and looking at the integration of renewable energy in the European Transmission Network.
SET Plan
EUREC is active in the development of policy inputs, which define common positions related to the renewable energy research community. As part of this role, in early 2013 EUREC provided an input to a public consultation from the European Commission on energy technology policy. The association’s contribution to this consultation focuses on the Strategy Energy Technology (SET) Plan, which has helped to elevate the importance of energy technology policy in Brussels. The SET Plan seeks to improve the way the EU executes innovation policy in energy. In particular (and this is one of the big ideas of Horizon 2020) it wants to bring EU and member state funding closer together. In the future, the Commission would like to combine its budget with the budgets of member states.
The public consultation gathered input from European stakeholders to prepare an official communication from the Commission on energy technologies and innovation – its first communication on the SET Plan since October 2009. This document was adopted in May 2013 and proposes measures to reinvigorate the SET Plan, but does not explain them in depth. Over the next six months, the Commission will test public reaction to the various ways in which its proposals could be put into practice.
Horizon 2020
Greg Arrowsmith, policy officer at EUREC, believes that the communication has come at the right time.
“It puts the SET Plan back in the mind of MEPs and member states at a time when discussions on Horizon 2020, particularly around the budgets for its different parts (including energy), are heading towards a conclusion. Horizon 2020 is the primary way in which the Commission can directly fund or finance the development of innovative energy technology.
“As to the Commission’s key ideas, they sound promising, but the devil will be in the detail. New layers of governance are proposed. One takes the form of a document (an Integrated Roadmap), which will become a bible for directing energy research and innovation money. Another is a ‘co-ordination structure under the SET Plan Steering Group’. The Commission is taking the gamble that with additional governance great progress in the co-ordination and impact of research spending can be achieved.”
The communication, however, is silent on how a revamped SET Plan Steering Group will ‘guide’ the writing of the Integrated Roadmap, or the form of the ‘co-ordination structure’.
Under Horizon 2020, the expectation is that funding for energy technology will increase substantially compared to FP7. In the period 2007-2013, €3.08bn was available for research, demonstrations and work to support soft measures to achieve European climate and energy targets. In the period 2014-2020, it seems the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament will agree on a figure between €5bn and €6.5bn for such work. Renewables are expected to receive a large share of this.
The Commission has hinted strongly that the money will be distributed through more open-ended (i.e. less prescriptive) calls. It will aim to allow funding from different Horizon 2020 subheadings to be combined in the same project easily.
Vinicius Valente
