SUNERGY Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
To mitigate climate change, our society must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and find solutions to move away from fossil resources. The European Union is clear to stay on a steady path to climate neutrality through the ‘Fit for 55’ package, with the EU Green Deal as a blueprint. Renewable energy based on photovoltaics and wind energy needs to be supplemented with energy carriers to supply fuels to sectors and processes difficult to electrify and to create non-fossil carbon feedstock for the chemical industry. These so-called solar fuels and chemicals are based on the transformation of abundant compounds, such as carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen, into synthetic fuels, chemicals and materials by using renewable energy.
SUNERGY is an open community advocating for solar fuels and chemicals as the new paradigm for a climate-neutral Europe in 2050. The community consists of a wide-range group of experts from industry, academia and society with more than 300 supporters. SUNERGY aims to become a large European Research and Innovation initiative working towards converting and storing renewable energy into fossil-free fuels and chemicals, complementing the scope of existing European partnerships.
With this goal, we are delighted to present you SUNERGY’s Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda on Solar Fuels and Chemicals (SRIA). Based on the SUNRISE Technological Roadmap, the Energy-X Research Needs report and Mission Innovation’s IC5 report, a core working group has merged and developed these ideas into the present document over the last three years.
The result is a living document which will be further developed with the SUNERGY community into a full solar fuels and chemicals technological roadmap. A big step forward has been the SUNERGY Joint roadmapping workshop on the future of solar fuels and chemicals, uniting over 140 stakeholders from industry, policy, and academia on 15/16 June 2022, Brussels. These dedicated actions are enabled by the EU Coordination and Support Action SUNER-C (Grant Agreement no. 101058481) funded for the June 2022 – May 2025 period.
How to get involved in shaping this strategic document for accelerating the development of solar fuels and chemicals? Please download the SRIA document, read it and provide any input using the form on the SUNER-C webpage. Besides, you are welcome to subscribe to our newsletter to get to know about the future workshops prepared for 2023!
Upcoming roadmapping activities: Inspired by the feedback from the participants of the SUNERGY roadmapping workshop, a Whitepaper on the SUNERGY Roadmap will be published online at the beginning of 2023. The next step will be the publication of a critical consolidated overview of the state-of-the-art, to be released also at the beginning of 2023. These strategic documents will be made widely available to the solar fuels and chemicals community and opened for your consultation and feedback as well.
If you want to interact closely in the elaboration of these documents, please contact us and become an expert in one of the Roadmap Working Groups.