Concentrated solar power

Every year hundreds of organisations and individuals in over 30 countries take part in the EU Sustainable Energy week by hosting Energy Day events and activities that promote energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

Last week a European Parliament committee approved an EU Roadmap to a low-carbon economy, which seeks to go beyond current carbon dioxide reduction targets.

Materials are at the core of industrial innovation and enable it. The materials presented in this new Roadmap complement and expand the technology roadmaps developed in the context of the SET-Plan as the basis for its implementation. It puts forward key materials research and innovation activities to advance energy technologies for the next 10 years.

Earlier this month Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn announced Horizon 2020, an EUR 80 billion programme to help achieve Europe's 2020 targets, which includes a package of measures to boost research, innovation and competitiveness in Europe.

The Warsaw conference on the European Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan) began on 28th November - the same day as the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, at which representatives of the world’s largest economies are discussing the future of limiting the world emission of carbon dioxide.

Last month the European Commission published its ‘Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe’. The Roadmap contains a series of medium- (2020) and long-term (2050) resource efficiency objectives as well as the means needed for achieving them, including targets by 2013 and milestones for 2020.

ATEsT (Analysing Transition Planning and Systemic Energy Planning Tools for the implementation of the Energy Technology Information System) brings together EU competence on a transition towards a low-carbon energy system through energy innovation, energy modelling activities and technology assessment.

A new IEA report describes how cogeneration is attractive to policy-makers, private users and investors because it delivers a range of energy, environmental and economic benefits.

In a communiqué issued on 18th March 2011, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) calls on the European Union to consider the security of its energy supply as one of the priorities of its external policy. The recommendation is one of the results of an Opinion on energy supply and neighbourhood policy commissioned by the current Hungarian EU presidency.

The European Commission presented on 31 January 2011 its communication "Renewable Energy: Progressing towards the 2020 target". The communication shows that the 2020 renewable energy policy goals are likely to be met - and exceeded - if Member States fully implement their national renewable energy action plans and if financing instruments are improved.

According to EC Commissioner for Energy, Günther Oettinger, the European Council’s first Summit on energy in Brussels on 4th February 2011 was “a breakthrough for European energy policy.” The Summit, he added, would be “a benchmark for the years to come.”

The EU is planning to invest around €1.2 billion in three new pan-European energy research infrastructures: a wind research facility in Denmark, a concentrated solar power (CSP) installation based in Spain and a nuclear research reactor in Belgium. EU research ministers, along with the European Commission, made the announcement on 29 November at the Infrastructures for Energy Research (ENERI) Conference, organised by the Belgian Presidency in Brussels.

The European Commission has recently published new EU energy scenarios in its report, ‘EU energy trends to 2030’.

A new report by the Joint Research Centre examines how increasing RD&D efforts for certain low-carbon power technologies will impact on the development of the European energy sector for 2020 and beyond.

A joint study by A.T. Kearney and the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association (ESTELA) shows the growing mid-term potential of solar thermal electricity (STE) to progressively substitute conventional energy sources and complement the renewable energy sources portfolio with a cost-competitive dispatchable solution.

The ‘Renewable Energy Snapshots’ report, published in July 2010 by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), shows that renewable energy sources accounted for 62%, or 17GW, of the new electricity generation capacity installed in the EU27 in 2009. This is up from 57% in 2008.

The European Union has issued a publication entitled "Europe’s Energy Position – Markets & Supply".

In response to the increasing need for energy innovation in Europe and beyond, the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA) is launching its new Joint Research Programmes to help strengthen, expand and optimise EU energy research. The first Joint Programmes of research on Wind, Photovoltaic, Smart Grids and Geothermal were officially launched during the SET-Plan conference, on 3-4 June 2010 in Madrid.

This 16-page brochure provides a concise overview of the SET-Plan, the European Industrial Initiatives (EIIs), the Steering Group, the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA) and SETIS.

The European Solar Thermal Electricity Association (ESTELA) is a European Industry Association to support the emerging European solar thermal electricity industry for the generation of green power in Europe and abroad, principally in the Mediterranean region. The SET-Plan gives the Solar Thermal Electricity Industry an enormous opportunity to develop Solar Thermal Electricity (STE) in Europe.

The framework of the Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) Joint Programme (which is to increase efficiency and decrease costs by decreasing fragmentation and redundancy as well as sharing of world-class research facilities through the joint realisation of pan-European research programmes) was outlined at the CSP meeting, held on the 9th September 2009 at the National Laboratory for Energy and Geology in Portugal.