Data Centres (DC) are among the largest yet increasing energy consumers, due to the rising digitization of human activities. RES integration and energy efficiency improvements have the potential to reduce significantly DC carbon footprint, while increasing at the same time the auto-consumed energy, thus improving DC security and resiliency of supply against climate change. However, very few solutions, despite validated in lab, have been successfully deployed on operational DCs, mostly due to technological fragmentation, excessive CAPEX and lack of appropriate business models. CATALYST will address these challenges through turning existing/new DCs into flexible multi-energy hubs, which can sustain investments in RES and energy efficiency by offering mutualized flexibility services to the smart energy grids (both electricity and heat grids). By leveraging on the outcomes of FP7 GEYSER and DOLPHIN projects, CATALYST will adapt, scale up, validate and deploy an innovative, adaptable technological and business framework aimed at i) exploiting available DC non-IT legacy assets (onsite RES/backup generation, UPS/batteries, cooling system thermal inertia, heat pump for waste heat reuse) to deliver simultaneous energy flexibility services to multi-energy coupled electricity/heat/IT load marketplaces ii) deploying Cross-DC cross-infrastructures (e.g. heat vs IT) IT workload orchestration, by combining heat-demand driven HPC geographical workload balancing, with traceable ICT-load migration between federated DCs to match IT demands with time-varying on-site RES (“follow the energy approach”) iii) providing marketplace-as-a-service tools to nurture novel ESCO2.0 business models. The adaptation and replication potential of CATALYST will be demonstrated through carrying out four different real life trials spanning through the full spectrum of DCs types (fully distributed DCs, HPC, co-location, legacy) and architectures (from large centralized versus decentralized micro-DCs).

Critical Energy infrastructures (CEI) protection and security are becoming of utmost importance in our everyday life. However, cyber and system-theoretic approaches fail to provide appropriate security levels to CEIs, since they are often used in isolation and build on incomplete attack models, resulting in silos-like security management fragmented operational policies. To face these challenges, DEFENDER will (i) model CEIs as distributed Cyber-Physical Systems for managing the potential reciprocal effects of cyber and physical threats (ii) deploy a novel security governance model, which leverages on lifecycle assessment for cost-effective security management over the time (iii) bring people at centre stage by empowering them as virtual sensors for threat detection, as first level emergency responders to attacks, or by considering workforce as potential threats. DEFENDER will adapt, integrate, upscale and validate a number of TRL 4-5 technologies and deploy them within a TRL7 integrated yet adaptable framework for CEI security, resilience and self-healing “by design”, with a view to address, detect, and mitigate cyber-physical threats. To this aim DEFENDER framework will combine a range of devices/technologies for situational awareness (fixed sensors like PMUs, mobile devices like drones and advanced video surveillance) (ii) intelligent processing for cyber-physical threat detection with (iii) a toolbox for incident mitigation and emergency response and (iv) Human-In-The-Loop for managing people interaction with CEI, while leveraging on blockchain technology for peer-to-peer trustworthiness. The effectiveness of DEFENDER will be extensively validated on a CEI lab emulator (RWTH, Germany) and on 4 real life demonstrators (in France, Italy and Slovenia) fully covering the overall energy value chain, ranging from a bulk generation plant (ENGIE SA), to a decentralized RES generation one (BFP), a TSO HV network (ELES), to a DSO network (ASM) and a business prosumer.

Despite a number of software frameworks and reference architectures have made available for 5G enabling technologies, there is a clear gap to bridge towards 5G seamless application with a number of “vertical” sectors. Energy vertical represents undoubtedly one of the most significant “test cases” for 5G enabling technologies, due to the need of addressing a huge range of very diverse requirements to deal with across a variety of applications (stringent capacity for smart metering/AMI versus latency for supervisory control and fault localization).However, to effectively support energy utilities along their transition towards more decentralized renewable-oriented systems, several open issues still remain as to 5G networks management automation, security, resilience, scalability and portability. To face these issues, NRG-5 will research and develop a novel 5G PPP-compliant software framework specifically tailored to the energy domain, which combines i) trusted, scalable and lock-in free plug ‘n’ play support for a variety of constrained devices; ii) 5G devices’ abstractions to demonstrate mMTC, uMTC and xMBB communications coupled with partially distributed, trusted, end-to-end security and MCM to enable secure, scalable and energy efficient communications; iii) extended Mobile Edge Computing (xMEC) micro-clouds to reduce backhaul load, increase the overall network capacity and reduce delays, while facilitating the deployment of generic MTC-related NFVs and utility-centric VNFs; iv) an extended 5G ETSI-MANO predictive analytics framework to support automated, dynamic, elastic VNF reconfiguration. Extensive lab based validation will be complemented with real life demonstrations in two pilot sites (Italy, France) where proof-of-concept implementations for 5G-enabled electricity and gas distribution network optimized management will be offered, while offering support to 5G PPP phase III projects via demonstrating high replication potential towards other verticals.