New and existing Energy Research Infrastructures

ECCSEL, short for European Carbon dioxide Capture and Storage Laboratory Infrastructure, was proposed by NTNU and SINTEF on behalf of the Norwegian Government, and put on the official European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) Roadmap in December 2008.

 The mission of ECCSEL is to form a pan-European integrated Research Infrastructure of Centres to build and operate new CCS R&D infrastructures. The ECCSEL will provide a unique integrated infrastructure for the experimental research needed to bring forward improved CCS technology that will be necessary for the implementation CCS on a very large scale globally.

ECCSEL targets to:

- Provide a scientific foundation to respond quickly and systematically to the urgent R&D needs in CCS at a pan-European level

- Maintain Europe at the forefront of the international CCS scientific community

- Increase the attractiveness of the European Research Area, reinforcing the research-based clusters and improving their socio-economic impacts

- Optimise the value and utilisation of public funding to CCS R&D

Areas where further R&D is needed have been identified by the European Zero Emissions Technology Platform - ZEP-TP (ZEP 2010), by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and in discussions involving the international research groups working in the field prior to a submission to ESFRI. The capture of CO₂ from power plant will most likely be most important in the future. For CO₂ capture from power plants, there are three main competing methods; pre-combustion, post-combustion and oxy-combustion. There is also a number of industrial processes where there is a potential to capture large amounts of CO₂; like in sweetening of natural gas, oil refineries, and in the production processes of ammonia, cement and various metals.

The ECCSEL research infrastructure is expected to be operational in 2015. Before ECCSEL can start, a Preparatory Phase (PP) of approximately 4 years is needed. The objective of the ECCSEL Preparatory Phase project is to address the primary tasks necessary to establish a new, integrated, pan-European infrastructure for state-of-the-art research on technologies enabling CCS. It aims as bringing ECCSEL to the level of legal and financial maturity required to implement the research infrastructure. The ECCSEL PP project starts in January 2011, and will be funded by the European Commission. ECCSEL will provide:

- Development of a laboratory infrastructure: Being on the ESFRI Roadmap implies priority for national funding contributions. This will make it easier for the participating institutions to develop their own facilities that are part of ECCSEL.

- Laboratory access to researchers and students: The open access principle means that researchers and students can go to laboratories and make experimental work that otherwise would not be possible.

- Extended research collaboration and activities: The exchange of personnel and the increase of networking activities will most likely result in more joint publications, spin-off products, spin-off companies and new related R&D projects. The infrastructure will provide a very innovative environment.

- Extended R&D efforts: More research work and subsequent results will be achieved because the most expensive part – the experimental facilities – will be shared and can possibly be better utilised. Consequently, many R&D projects do not necessarily need to spend much of their budget for providing the experimental facilities, but can rather increase man-hour efforts.

 The Windscanner, new Research Infrastructure (RI) in the form of a European Centre for Wind Energy Research in Atmospheric Turbulent Flow, has been proposed under the auspices of the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA) for wind energy. EERA has submitted a proposal for a wind scanner facility to be included in the ESFRI Roadmap 2010. It introduces a unique new experimental research methodology for full-scale measurements of the detailed 3D structure of wind flow around wind turbines  and other static or rotating objects.

The primary goal of the new wind scanning experimental facility is to gain further fundamental understanding of the basic aerodynamics and structural fluid dynamics for a wind energy system in the real environment.

The facility is a unique, distributed research infrastructure that will provide fundamentally new knowledge about the wind and will lead to more efficient, stronger and lighter wind turbines. Exploiting recent advances in laser wind measurement techniques, mobile 3-D remote sensing wind scanners will be deployed by seven large energy research institutes across Europe. This will provide an important catalysis to the future cooperation and integration of the European wind energy research infrastructures.

The field-deployable windscanners will be based at EU partners distributed throughout Europe. Built from sets of portable laser Doppler wind profilers, the windscanners can sense the 3D wind vector field at distant points at rates up to 500 Hz. This will enable measurements of 3D wind fields around large individual wind turbine rotors or within or behind wind turbine arrays and parks, both on and offshore.

The presentation will describe the Windscanner objectives and technology as well as the proposed organizational framework for the development and implementation for this new European research infrastructure.

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is a unique persistent pan-European Research Infrastructure for High Performance Computing (HPC). PRACE forms the top level (Tier-0) of the European HPCecosystem and provides access to computing resources at the highest performance level and offers sophisticated services for scientific simulations in all fields of research and engineering.HPC organisations from fourteen states prepared the legal, financial, and technical basis for the creation of the PRACE Research Infrastructure supported in part through the European Commission’s 7th Framework Program. Since April 2010 PRACE Research Infrastructure is established as a Belgiuminternational non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. Twenty European states are presently members of the PRACE AISBL, represented through their national supercomputer organisations. France, Germany, Italy, and Spain committed 100 Mio € each to fund and operate Tier-0 systems by 2012. The European Commissioncontinues to support the implementation of the PRACE service in a First Implementation phase project.

Access to the PRACE RI is open to European researchers and their collaborators from recognized European academic institutions and industry. Calls for Proposals are issued twice a year and are evaluated by leading scientists and engineers in a peer-review process governed by a PRACE Scientific Steering Committee. The first ten projects have been granted resources on the first PRACE system, the IBMBlue Gene/P at Germany’s Gauss Center for Supercomputing in Juelich. The Bull system deployed by GENCI in France will be available in the next call.

Examples will demonstrate how the powerful method of numerical simulations can solve challenges in the field of energy research and contribute to efficient use of energy, conservation of scarce resources, and ultimately help to reach Europe’s goal for climate control.  HPCplays a major role in fusion research and especially in the ITER project. Problems of material science and plasma physics can only be solved today with the help of simulation science.

PRACE supports European scientists and engineers to exploit the unprecedented capabilities of current and future supercomputer to solve real world problems and helps them to maintain or reach leadership positions in the international competition.

Regarding the power consumption of the supercomputers of the highest capacity also research on highly energy efficient HPCsystems is crucial. Future multi-Petascale systems will very likely consume many MW of electrical power. PRACE itself works in the field of green IT with industrial partners on highly energy efficient HPCcomponents and systems.