Between 2017 and 2020, about 50 m € funds have been allocated to make fossil fuels power plants highly flexible and efficient through the EU research and innovation programme Horizon 2020. These funds have helped researchers all around Europe develop and improve solutions that can help us reduce our carbon footprint by retrofitting and leveraging existing reliable assets, thermal power plants.
These investments highlight the importance of developing solutions for a deeper integration into an advance energy system with a higher shares of renewable energies, where thermal power plants shifts their role from base-load to fluctuating power sources, to meet unpredictable and short-noticed demand peaks and avoid disruption in the electrical grid.
The 5 EU-funded projects TURBO-REFLEX, PUMP-HEAT, sCO2-flex, FLEXnCONFU and HYFLEXPOWER have focused their efforts in developing a broad array of solutions to increase flexibility while lowering GHG emissions: power-to-x-to-power solutions, low-carbon gasses combustion, Heat pumps supercritical CO2, components and machine optimisations. All of those solutions will respond to the different needs across the whole continent, supporting and strengthening the energy system in the short, medium and long-term.
I this final episode of the webinar series, 5 project coordinators together with representatives of ETIP SNET and the European Commission will discuss about the next steps and research directions, as well as the challenges still to be addressed.
Attendance is free of charge. Registration is now open at https://etn.global/?post_type=events&p=25076
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 764545.