European excellence in solar thermal energy
Funded by the EU, the project 'The European Solar Research Infrastructure for Concentrated Solar Power' (EU-SOLARIS) brings together industry and researchers to promote CST technologies. The goal is to create a unique distributed European research infrastructure (RI) for such technologies. The Preparatory Phase of the project consists of 15 partners from 9 countries. These partners manage some of the best large RI for CST technologies in Europe. The project will ensure that RI activities are aligned with industry needs, while private funding will complement public funding. EU-SOLARIS will provide the most complete, high-quality scientific infrastructure portfolio at international level, facilitating researchers' access to the highly specialised RI through a single access point. It will also provide financial resource management to complement research and avoid technology duplication. Considerable efforts have been devoted to address main questions pertinent to the project set-up. Some of these include determining that the best legal structure for EU-SOLARIS is the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), identifying the portfolio of services it should provide to the industry and research community, and developing a preliminary business model to be proposed to the countries that will integrate the EU-SOLARIS ERIC. In addition, it has addressed issues such as how project infrastructures should be upgraded and has started considering what additional RI is needed to meet future demands and research needs and how to engage industry. Other tasks include preparation of the project c0ommon vision and drafting of the communication plan. The project website has already been launched. Being the first of its kind, EU-SOLARIS will consolidate Europe's position at the forefront of CST technologies.
Keywords
Concentrating Solar Thermal and Solar Chemistry technologies, large distributed research infrastructure, single access point, European Research Infrastructure Consortium
