Member nations of the European Union are spending up big on clean and renewable energy infrastructure, announcing plans to build three separate new pan-European energy research facilities.
A wind research facility is planned in Denmark, a concentrated solar power installation in Spain and a nuclear research reactor in Belgium. The overall investment is about € 1.2 billion (AUD$1.6 billion).
The new cross-national facilities are part of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), aimed at binding Euro-zone nations into cooperative strategies on clean energy planning.
The EU is pushing the research envelope with the ESFRI’s updated “2010 Roadmap,” which has “has identified 50 new research infrastructures or major upgrades of existing ones, in order to stay at the forefront of research over the next 10 – 20 years.” Their total construction cost amounts to about €20 billion.
According to European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, “These facilities will enable ground-breaking research and innovation and ultimately they could help to secure the EU’s future energy supply. We need to bring research, technology, industry and market implementation closer together and that is the purpose of the European Strategic Energy Technology Plan.”
Windscanner is the name of the €60 million Denmark project, which will produce detailed maps of wind conditions over the several square kilometre wind farm. This will lead to more innovative designs of more efficient, durable wind turbines.
The solar research infrastructure EU-SOLARIS at the Advanced Technological Centre for Renewable Energy in Tabernas, Almeria (Spain) focuses on developing new technologies for concentrated solar power and has a construction cost of about € 80 million.
