The CryoHub innovation project will investigate and extend the potential of large-scale Cryogenic Energy Storage (CES) and will apply the stored energy for both cooling and energy generation. By employing Renewable Energy Sources (RES) to liquefy and store cryogens, CryoHub will balance the power grid, while meeting the cooling demand of a refrigerated food warehouse and recovering the waste heat from its equipment and components. The intermittent supply is a major obstacle to the RES power market. In reality, RES are fickle forces, prone to over-producing when demand is low and failing to meet requirements when demand peaks. Europe is about to generate 20% of its required energy from RES by 2020, so that the proper RES integration poses continent-wide challenges. The Cryogenic Energy Storage (CES), and particularly the Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES), is a promising technology enabling on-site storage of RES energy during periods of high generation and its use at peak grid demand. Thus, CES acts as Grid Energy Storage (GES), where cryogen is boiled to drive a turbine and to restore electricity to the grid. To date, CES applications have been rather limited by the poor round trip efficiency (ratio between energies spent for and retrieved from energy storage) due to unrecovered energy losses. The CryoHub project is therefore designed to maximise the CES efficiency by recovering energy from cooling and heating in a perfect RES-driven cycle of cryogen liquefaction, storage, distribution and efficient use. Refrigerated warehouses for chilled and frozen food commodities are large electricity consumers, possess powerful installed capacities for cooling and heating and waste substantial amounts of heat. Such facilities provide the ideal industrial environment to advance and demonstrate the LAES benefits. CryoHub will thus resolve most of the above-mentioned problems at one go, thereby paving the way for broader market prospects for CES-based technologies across Europe.

The growing attractiveness of cities leads to increasing population, thus rising energetic and food demands in urban areas. This makes urban waste management increasingly challenging, both in terms of logistics and environmental or health impacts. To decrease the cities’ environmental impacts and to contribute to a better resilience of urban areas towards energy or food supply crisis, waste management systems have to be improved to increase recycling of resources and local valorization. In this context, the DECISIVE project proposes to change the present urban metabolism for organic matter (foods, plants, etc.), energy and biowaste to a more circular economy and to assess the impacts of these changes on the whole waste management cycle. Thus, the challenge will be to shift from a urban “grey box”, implying mainly goods importation and extra-urban waste management, to a cooperative organization of intra- and peri-urban networks enabling circular local and decentralised valorization of biowaste, through energy and bioproducts production. Such a new waste management paradigm is expected to increase the sustainability of urban development by: (1) promoting citizens awareness about waste costs and values; (2) promoting renewable energy production and use in the city; (3) developing an industrial ecology approach that can promote the integration between urban and peri-urban areas, by providing valuable agronomic by-products for urban agriculture development and so improving the balance of organic products and waste in the city; (4) developing new business opportunities and jobs. In order to achieve these objectives, the project DECISIVE will develop and demonstrate, at real scale, eco-innovative solutions addressed to waste operators and public services, consisting in: (1) a decision support tool to plan, design and assess efficient decentralised management networks for biowaste in urban areas; (2) eco-designed solid-state fermentation processes. Moreover in parallel of real scale demonstration sites, an eco-designed new micro-anaerobic digestion process will be developed and tested.