Description

CONTEXT

The representatives of the Commission emphasized the importance of the future of SPIRE for Europe’s New Green Deal. This green deal is predicted to be Europe’s most important peace-time transition since the creation of the Union. Since the future partnership on the process industry will be key for many elements of the new green deal, the European Commission proposes specific steps to work more closely with SPIRE.

 

SPIRE ROADMAP

 

The SPIRE roadmap currently requests about 17B€ over 10 years for the 2020 – 2030 period. Meanwhile, the high-level group on energy-intensive industries estimates costs for the transformation of these industries at 40B€ for the 10-year period. To show perspective, Germany alone invested 45B€ in photovoltaïcs alone over only 3 years (2010 – 2012). However, these values are very small in comparison to the 500B€/ year value of the process industry in Europe.

For the transition, the process industries will need lots of clean electricity, green hydrogen and infrastructure to transport it and transport CO2.

Social sciences must be taken into account to ensure that the new process industries well serve people and society as a whole by taking into account social sciences and humanities issues, including social acceptance, education, regulations, gender equality, etc.

There is still some room for improvement in the roadmap, notably in terms of waste management. Members are invited to provide their feedback until Dec 13^th (and even beyond until Feb 14^th which is the final deadline to contribute feedback, but not major unrequested changes). The ambition, timing and scope of the roadmap are clear. However, we need to provide more specific, concrete targets and impacts.We need to ensure that the projects have sufficient scale and concrete results on decarbonisation, circularity, integration of renewables, digitalisation, etc.

If it is not possible or effective to set targets in the scope of SPIRE and Horizon Europe, then the Commission could put the targets into law and then companies and MS could be brought to court. So, this is an opportunity to put the targets into calls, to keep them voluntary.

 

Summary of the main topics in the SPIRE roadmap (future calls)

 

The roadmap is comprised of “innovation areas”. These innovation areas are listed below along with an estimation of the percentage of projects that are expected to reach TRL9 by 2030, 2040 and 2050.

The agenda and presentations are available here:

 

 

 

For more information, please contact Jennifer SHAW-TABERLET

jennifer.shaw-taberlet@axelera.org