Industrial Ecosystems: Renewable Energy

Submitted by Veronika Muller on 25 September 2020

Summary of the European Alliance Against Coronavirus Daily Webinar on 23 September 2020

Renewable energy plays a big role in the EU Climate Target Plan, a proposal to cut net greenhouse gas emission by at least 55% by 2030. Julia Walschebauer, DG ENER, presented data on the technology shares that belong to the ecosystem of renewable energy. Overall, the renewables are increasing in the European market, and jobs related to this sector have grown, reaching a peak in 2011. However, the ecosystem faces declining national budgets of Member States devoted to clean energy R&I, declining private investments, and declining patenting activity. She sees opportunities in the wind, renewable hydrogen and ocean energy industry, Smart Grids, solar photovoltaic and Li-ion batteries.

Bianca Dragomir from Avaesen shared her cluster´s activity to “re-energise” under the Green Deal, which provides a good opportunity for cluster to create new business models and scale up their activities. The cluster is currently working on innovation projects with the aim to bring more start-ups to the clean energy sector. Since the beginning of the crisis, they have been working with the regional government to unlock investments and bring jobs to the ecosystem. Furthermore, the cluster is working with the local community to scale up and to create decentralised local energy communities.

Henrik te Heesen from Ecoliance Rheinland-Pfalz presented the regional innovation strategy of Rhineland-Palatinate. Ecoliance is working on bringing these areas together and share knowledge through clusters and networks. He pointed out that energy efficiency and environmentally friendly energy technology have the biggest potential on the global market in volumes. However, Europe is losing in shares globally. The research in Rhineland-Palatinate provides major incentives towards innovation for the global energy revolution and application markets of water and sewage treatment, energy efficiency in industry, circular economy, and the treatment and commercial exploitation of biomass.

A recording of the session is available here.

These are the presentations shown during the meeting:

Presentation - RES ecosystem_22.09.pdf Renewable_energy_ECCP_2020.pdf S3 in Rhineland-Palatinate - Regional Innovation Strategy (1).pdf

Further links:

Innovation Strategy Rhineland-Palatinate

Net-Wind

International CleanTech Network

Global CleanTech Cluster Association

Find information and recordings of previous meetings on the Role of Clusters in Accelerating the European Recovery (since September 2020) here. For European Alliance Against Coronavirus webinar summaries of March - July 2020, please follow this link.

Finally, please find information on the upcoming agenda here.

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