The EU Energy Projects Podcast

In the latest episode of the EU Energy Projects Podcast, Areti Ntaradimou had a discussion with Vasilis Kotrogiannis, representing the Smart Energy Cluster, about why clusters like this may be more valuable than they first appear.

The Smart Energy Cluster already brings together 39 ongoing projects and its mission is simple: help EU-funded initiatives cooperate, share results, and avoid working in isolation.

That may sound obvious. Yet in practice, many projects still operate in parallel, each running their own dissemination plans, events, newsletters and stakeholder outreach. Necessary work, yes, but often repetitive.

This is where clusters can make a real difference.

According to Vasilis, members gain access to joint events, collaboration workshops, networking opportunities and shared visibility through the cluster’s channels. More importantly, they can exchange technical know-how, discuss replication pathways, and build partnerships beyond the usual communication exercise.

In this episode of the EU Energy Projects Podcast, Angelina Broukou of the Horizon Europe-funded SINNOGENES project, offers a timely reminder that while storage technologies themselves are not new, the way we deploy and integrate them is where the real challenge, and opportunity, lies.

“Storage is what makes renewables reliable and usable at scale,” Angelina explains. It is a simple statement, but one that captures a growing reality: without storage, the variability of renewables risks becoming a structural limitation rather than a manageable feature of the system.

Yet SINNOGENES does not focus on a single technology. Instead, it brings together batteries, thermal storage, hydrogen and even flywheels, connecting them through a digital layer and testing them across six real-life pilots in Europe. From industrial sites in Portugal and Germany to microgrids in Spain and island systems such as Ikaria in Greece, the project moves beyond theory to explore how these solutions perform in practice.

In the latest episode of the EU Energy Projects Podcast, the spotlight turns to one of the most critical—and often overlooked—pillars of Europe’s clean energy transition: buildings.

Recorded in the context of Enlit Europe 2025 in Bilbao, this episode follows the session “Flexible Solutions Empowering Citizens” and explores how thermal energy storage and digital integration can unlock flexibility at the local level. Joining the discussion are Emilia Pisani and Guillermo Andrés Nieto, representing the Thermal Energy Storage Cluster (TES Cluster), a collaboration of four Horizon Europe projects: THUMBS UP, ECHO, BEST Storage and Hi-Store.

Katrin Stökle, project manager at Steinbeis Europa Sentrum, discusses how the Steinbeis project cluster is approaching the decarbonisation of energy intensive industries.

Five diverse projects – of which four are active and one completed – comprise the Steinbeis energy cluster, with the common goal of decarbonising and advancing the energy transition of energy intensive processes in various industries.

These are H2GLASS and MOST-H2 focussed on how hydrogen can be used in industrial processes in the glass and transport sectors and COREu and CAPTUS focussed on carbon capture, use and storage in sectors such as steel, cement and chemicals. The completed project is FLEX4FACT, which focussed on the use of flexibility in industry through enabling production processes to adapt dynamically to renewable energy availability.

Areti Ntaradimou joined by Laurent Schmit from Project EDDIE, an EU-driven initiative transforming how energy data is accessed and shared across Europe. By building a decentralized, open-source Data Space aligned with EU Clean Energy Package rules, EDDIE supports interoperability, strengthens Europe’s energy resilience, and reinforces the EU’s geopolitical and economic ambitions.