University of Mannheim Receives High EU Grant for Groundbreaking Energy Projects

The renewable energies’ share in power consumption and heat supply is growing steadily. However, the technical infrastructure required to use wind and solar as efficiently as possible is often missing. An international team of universities and companies received a high EU grant to research how the use of renewable energies can be integrated into the daily life of people. The grant awarded to the RENergetic project is part of the EU funding program Horizon 2020. The total grant amounts to six million euros over a period of three and a half years. The University of Mannheim receives 826,000 euros of this sum. The project starts on November 1, 2020.

Self-sufficient energy islands in Gent, Segrate and Poznan
During the term of the project, three innovative projects on the use of renewable energies at three locations in Europe will be implemented. The goal is complete self-sufficiency in terms of energy.  In the city of Gent in Belgium, an urban housing project will become an energy island. In a district close to the harbor, the people who live and work there will generate all energy they consume by using renewable resources. In Poznan in Poland, university buildings and student housing will be heated by using the heat generated by the university’s computing center. In a hospital in Segrate in Italy, the researchers plan to introduce an electrical mobility service for patients, employees and the city’s population which is powered by renewable energies.

“Our goal is to let the people control much of their  energy and power consumption, in the hope that this will accelerate energy transition. In our pilot projects, we will show how this can be done”, Sonja Klingert, the project supervisor, says.