IRENA reported that in EU there were around 1.2 million renewable energy jobs in 2013. Sustainlabor estimated that the solid biomass supported 273,000 direct and indirect jobs, the solar 268,110 and wind power 253,145 jobs in 2010. This mechanism can be stimulated on EU,  national and regional level.

Breaking it down to regional efforts, one has to remember that teritorial strategies in EU
exhibit many differences. In some countries policies are overseen by the
central governments, but sub-national governments are responsible for the planning and
financing of spatial policies. The other have few explicit territorial policies, or longterm
goals and priorities are designed (and financed) centrally, with emphasis on clusters,
competitiveness, and urban regeneration, although specific territorial policies are
designed and delivered at the regional and sub-regional levels.

The contribution will concentrate on several examples.

As fiscal budgets are under pressure and funding of research is questioned, a renewed understanding of the role of science and education is needed. The economic benefits of highly educated citizens is a long term effect and is only part of the puzzle. Society needs many different levels of education and trades to function, however academia should help move society forward. In regions where industrial, medical or communication technology is strong, one or more universities are typically educating new staff and collaborating on research topics. In order to harvest such effects locally in other regions, the global, EU and national policy makers needs to understand that a strong connection to local production companies, organisations, businesses or authorities is important. Its important because applied research needs to be conducted close to the challenges and because good solutions come from collaborating with the involved staff - from carpenters to blue-collar workers, unskilled workers in industry and accountants. The gaps between development in regions can only be dealt with a long term commitment. The current gaps between regions may reflect a lack of commitment in stable funding and encouragement to collaborate locally. The Smart City Horizon 2020 programs are good examples of how such collaboration can facilitate local universities and companies to work together across Europe. Other examples, from a company perspective are that increasingly energy and labour intense production is moving back to Europe, due to the need to be more agile in changing production, but also in order for companies to innovate and ensure R&D can take place. Some companies have realized that production and services go hand in hand with the possibility to innovate and hence R&D should take place in the vicinity of the actual core elements of the company or organization. Funding needs to be stable on a local and national state level, as research requires a long term commitment. Additional funding from EU and other organisations should encourage local triple-helixes between universities, business and authorties while also ensuring cross-border knowledge transfer. 

The new sustainable development goals set clear targets for the global society to be achieved in only fifteen years from now. Research and politics as part of the society have their – individual and collective - responsibilities to contribute to the achievement.

These global challenges need to be tackled in the Global South, while “international research” is often focused on research of the Global North. The share of scientific journal papers written by researchers from Sub-Saharan African countries decreased in the last decade from 1% to 0,7% and most developing countries only have a very low share of researchers in their population. E.g. Ethiopia has only 42 researchers per one million inhabitant and Mexico 380, while Croatia has 1550 and Finland even more than 7480 researchers per one million population (in 2012). Although these benchmarks and their potential for quantifying scientific work might be questioned, they can still give an idea of the existing imbalance.

So next to discussing the important aspects of how to ensuring sustainable ways to support research and to increase potential in Europe, other pressing questions are how to increase and unfold the potential and how to ensure mutual (and not uni-directional) knowledge exchange with and within the global South. 

The value of various energy forms does not depend only on total energy used for their generation but also on timing. In other words, energy form produced when nobody needs it has little value. Storage of energy increases its value. Use of energy in different sectors has different value. Therefore, converting one energy form (e.g. electricity) into another (e.g. fuel) makes sense when it will be used in a sector where such conversion will result in a higher value or has a technical advantage. One of the fuels often considered either as a transportation fuel or as a medium for large scale energy storage is hydrogen. Hydrogen can be easily produced from electricity in the electrolysis process. Hydrogen as a transportation fuel has advantage over batteries for longer range vehicles (including airplanes). In energy storage batteries have clear efficiency advantage over hydrogen but other issues, such as scale, volume, weight, material availability, envronmental impact, etc. should be considered. Conversion of hydrogen in other fuels (such as methane) can be justified if there is a higher value application for such fuel or  if there is a technical advantage (such as existing infrastructure).

The electrofuels are going to play important role in the future smart energy systems as they are offering a missing link between excessive renewable electricity penetration and transport sector. These fuels can be seen as electricity storage in the form of liquid or gaseous fuels and this opens a door to fuel storage systems already put in place. Electrofuels create flexibility in the system that will enable an extensive penetration of fluctuating resources into the electric grid. Based on today’s knowledge and expectations, it is unlikely that modal shift or electrification will completely remove the dependence on liquid or gaseous fuels in some modes of transport, such as heavy-duty trucks, shipping and air travel. Electrofuels provide an option for the parts of transport that cannot be electrified and due to the scarcity of biomass resources this part of transport demand cannot be met by different types of biofuels. The electrofuels can be produce by different production cycles and in this way be adjusted to the system designs. Moreover, all production cycles finish with chemical synthesis therefore the fuel produced can be adjusted to the existing infrastructure in place. As today’s infrastructure is built for liquid fuels and to some extent gaseous fuels, the further transformation of produced hydrogen from water electrolysis to fuels like methanol, DME or methane is beneficial in order to avoid extensive infrastructure changes and costs for alterations. 

Olivier Taupin of B2B Social Media Executive recently stated: Everywhere one turns there are discussions about energy storage and whether it's the critical missing piece that utilities need to integrate solar and wind onto the grid. While cost and technology challenges previously prevented the market from breaking out, there can be no doubt the storage industry today is growing fast. Analysts expect the trend to not only continue, but accelerate over the coming years. As the market quickly grows, it's necessary to find a trusted source for the latest news and analysis on energy storage.

This has been obvious a statement, which has been supported by most researchers and industrialist. SDEWES Conference has become one of the sources of unbiased information. Many researchers have been looking for complicated solutions including hydrogen and fuel cells. However even after many decades and huge investment they have not proven to be practical.

One possible contribution to this is an extension of Heat Integration on Total Sites (Klemeš at al., 1977) and Locally Integrated Energy Systems (Perry at al., 2008) into Power Integration and Hybrid Systems.

Selection of energy storage technology in hybrid power systems (HPS) is vital due to the unique advantages and capabilities offered by different storage technologies. For an optimal operation, the efficient and economical storage system for an HPS should be selected. Mohammad Rozali at al. (2015) introduces a new systematic generic framework to determine the most cost-effective storage technology for an HPS. A Power Pinch Analysis tool called the AC/DC modified storage cascade table has been developed to optimise the HPS by considering various storage technologies. The economics of the various types of storage modes was analysed, taking into account the associated energy losses, among others. The method was applied to two case studies with different power trends to evaluate the effect of storage efficiencies and storage form on the performance of HPS. A superconducting magnetic storage system of 26.12 kWh capacity, that gives an investment payback period of 3.6 y, is the most cost-effective storage technology for the small-scale household system in Case Study 1. For the large-scale industrial application presented in Case Study 2, the Lead–Acid battery with a capacity of 15.38 MWh gives the lowest payback period (1.43 y).

They are some other approached being developed fast and it becomes the time for demonstration projects. Those options should be discussed during the Panel.

While the urgency of energy storage is of varying concern in the national energy systems globally, some countries are in need of dealing with issues of very high levels of fluctuating renewable energy now. There is still a lack of understanding for the importance of thermal grids for renewable energy in the electricity grid, however it is positive that the concept that thermal storage is cheaper than electricity storage seems to be spreading. Such development is good however in countries with very high levels of fluctuating resources the urgency of integrating the transport system is eminent. While there is an increasing focus on power-to-gas, there is a lack of understanding for the facts that 1) power-to-liquids may in some cases be more feasible, 2) it is not trivial for what the produced fuels are used (electricity, heat or transport), and 3) that the complexity of such systems is much higher than simply implying that we can re-use the current natural gas grids and storages for this purpose. 

Electrochemical energy conversion (EEC) technologies can become a key component in energy systems with a high share of renewable energy from intermittent sources. When electricity production exceeds consumption electrolysis can be used to convert electricity to fuels for the transportation sector, similarly in cases when the electricity production does not meet the consumption fuel cells can be used to convert fuels to electricity. Solid oxide cells (SOC) are among the most promising EEC technologies because of their high efficiency, low material cost and fuel flexibility. Another strength of the SOC technology is that it can be operated reversibly, that is both in electrolysis and fuel cell mode. With one system that can both produce large amounts of transportation fuels and serve as a strategic reserve for the electricity grid when needed, purchase of other reserve units (e.g. gas turbines), that would stand unused most of the time, can be avoided.  Reversible SOCs can also be integrated with different heating systems, since, during fuel cell operation high grade heat is produced and during electrolysis mode heat can be consumed in order to increase the electrical efficiency.

Given the fact that the simultaneous approach to the synthesis and retrofit of Total Site, where Heat Integration is performed simultaneously within and between processes using either direct heat transfer or the usual indirect transfer via intermediate utilities, gives rise to problems with a considerably higher number of interactions to be exploited and, hence, better solutions, when compared to the sequential approach. However, posing and then solving related large-scale mathematical models simultaneously is not a straightforward task. Based on experience gained recently and especially during performing retrofit of an existing refinery Total Site, the objective of this contribution is to discuss advantages and pitfalls of using Mathematical Programming approach for solving simultaneously Total Site Heat Integration systems and to briefly highlight some important capabilities of advanced optimization codes TransGen and HENSYN.

Heat Pinch Analysis retrofit projects are typically performed by evaluating and maximising the heat recovery potentials within the individual process units. Once the potential improvements from the individual units have been assessed, the Total Site (TS) Heat Integration analysis is performed. Such approach may steer designers away from the promising retrofit opportunities and lead to suboptimal heat exchanger networks (HEN). This paper presents an effective retrofit framework for a Total Site (TS) system to determine the most cost-effective retrofit options and maximise the potential savings. Instead of performing the typical unit-wise process retrofit, the strategy is to determine the baseline total site consumption and benchmark targets, and to identify retrofit options from the TS context. This TS retrofit framework has been tested on a case study involving a petrochemical plant comprising of multiple process sections. The results of the analysis show that significant energy savings can be realised when both direct and indirect heat recovery retrofit options are evaluated. Further energy savings can be achieved via the plus-minus principle that helps pinpoint the correct locations of heat surpluses and deficits and lead to the appropriate TS retrofit solution. As a conclusion, energy retrofit projects should be approached from the total site context, followed by the unit-wise retrofit (i.e., retrofit of the individual process sections).

The more we rely on renewable resources, process industry of the future will be shaped by limited resources basic resources, in particular land and water. These resources are contested for basic human needs like food, energy provision and materials. Their quantity and quality are defined by spatial context. This will shape our supply chains, which in turn shape the structure of our conversion technologies.

For process industry this means that it cannot convert raw materials in its plants based on a “gate2gate” approach. Limited resources require a maximum of management, taking into account their natural status, their interrelation and the impact of process industry on their quality. This in turn requires a new process concept that takes all activities from harnessing the basic resources land and water to the logistics that provide energy and raw materials to their conversion and finally to closing the cycle by bringing back nutrients to the land into account. The main objective of process industry within this expanded process concept is to optimally transform natural income (which is mainly solar radiation) into societal benefit while improving the quality of the basic resources fertile land and sufficient and clean water.

A holistic framework to design a minimum water utilisation network should consider various options to minimise water including elimination, reduction, reuse/recycling, outsourcing and regeneration.  Even though such framework enables significant water reductions, some costly water management options may lead to long investment paybacks.  A cost-effective minimum water network for an industrial total site can be generated using the Systematic Hierarchical Approach for Resilient Process Screening (SHARPS) technique described in this paper.  SHARPS uses two simple strategies, i.e. substitution and intensification, guided by a composite plot of investment versus annual savings (IAS) to systematically isolate cost-effective and affordable water management options prior to design.