AI spreading in the energy sector is expected to dramatically reshape energy value chain in the next years, by improving business processes performance, while increasing environmental sustainability, strengthening social relationships and propagating high social value among citizens. However, uncertain business cases, fragmented regulations, standards immaturity and low-technical SMEs workforce skills barriers are actually hampering the full exploitation of AI along the energy value chain. I-NERGY will deliver: (i) Financing support through Open Calls to third parties SMEs for new energy use cases and technology building blocks validation, as well as for developing new AI-based energy services, while fully aligning to AI4EU service requirements and strengthening the SME competitiveness on AI for energy; (b) An open modular framework for supporting AI-on-Demand in the energy sector by capitalising on state-of-the-art AI, IoT, semantics, federated learning, analytics tools, which leverage on edge-level AI-based cross-sector multi-stakeholder sovereignty and regulatory preserving interoperable data handling. I-NERGY aims at evolving, scaling up and demonstrating innovative AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) Energy Analytics Applications and digital twins services that will be validated along 9 pilots, which: (a) Span over the full energy value chain, ranging from optimised management of grid and non-grid RES assets, improved efficiency and reliability of electricity networks operation, optimal risk assessment for energy efficiency investments planning, optimising local and virtual energy communities involvement in flexibility and green energy marketplaces; (b) Delivers other energy and non-energy services to realise synergies among energy commodities (district heating, buildings) and with non-energy sectors (i.e. e-mobility, personal safety/security, AAL), and with non- or low-technical domains end users (i.e. elderly people).

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.

PHOENIX aims to offer a cyber-shield armour to European EPES infrastructure enabling cooperative detection of large scale, cyber-human security and privacy incidents and attacks, guarantee the continuity of operations and minimize cascading effects in the infrastructure itself, the environment, the citizens and the end-users at reasonable cost. PHOENIX will realise 3 strategic goals: (1) Strengthen EPES cybersecurity preparedness by employing security a) “by design” via novel protective concepts for resilience, survivability, self-healing and accountability, and b) “by innovation” via adapting, upgrading and integrating a number of TRL5 developments to TRL7-8 and validating them in real-live large scale pilots; (2) Coordinate European EPES cyber incident discovery, response and recovery, contributing to the implementation of the NIS Directive by developing and validating at national Member States and pan-European level, a novel fully decentralized inter-DLTs/blockchain based near real-time synchronized cybersecurity information awareness platform, among authorized EPES stakeholders, utilities, CSIRTs, ISACs, CERTs, NRAs and the strategic NIS cooperation group; (3) Accelerate research and innovation in EPES cybersecurity by a novel deploy, monitor, detect and mitigate DevSecOps mechanism, a secure gateway, privacy preserving federated Machine Learning algorithms and establishment of certification methodologies and procedures through a Netherlands-based Cybersecurity Certification Centre. PHOENIX consist of a prestigious consortium of 25 partners (+1 third party), supported by the CERT-RO, covering all required expertise including energy (RES) generation/VPP, TSO, DSOs, aggregators, retailers, prosumers, end-users, technology providers, SMEs. PHOENIX validation will take place in 5 large scale pilots covering the complete value chain from generation to consumption, including cross-border experiments and cascading effects to other critical infrastructures.

This proposal is an application to the EU programme “Horizon 2020” and its topic “Large scale energy storage” (LCE-09-2015). The presented project “STORE&GO” will demonstrate three “innovative Power to Gas storage concepts” at locations in Germany, Switzerland and Italy in order to overcome technical, economic, social and legal barriers. The demonstration will pave the way for an integration of PtG storage into flexible energy supply and distribution systems with a high share of renewable energy. Using methanation processes as bridging technologies, it will demonstrate and investigate in which way these innovative PtG concepts will be able to solve the main problems of renewable energies: fluctuating production of renewable energies; consideration of renewables as suboptimal power grid infrastructure; expensive; missing storage solutions for renewable power at the local, national and European level. At the same time PtG concepts will contribute in maintaining natural gas or SNG with an existing huge European infrastructure and an already advantageous and continuously improving environmental footprint as an important primary/secondary energy carrier, which is nowadays in doubt due to geo-political reasons/conflicts. So, STORE&GO will show that new PtG concepts can bridge the gaps associated with renewable energies and security of energy supply. STORE&GO will rise the acceptance in the public for renewable energy technologies in the demonstration of bridging technologies at three “living” best practice locations in Europe.