The European Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan) aims to transform the way we produce and use energy in the EU with the goal of achieving EU leadership in the development of technological solutions capable of delivering 2020 and 2050 energy and climate targets.

Innovative materials are required for the manufacture of low-carbon energy technologies if Europe is to meet these energy and climate challenges in a cost-effective manner. The following is a chronological overview of some of the actions taken to promote advanced materials research across the EU, in addition to a more general look at recent actions in support of the SET-Plan.

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Materials for Energy

• The European Commission has put in place two pieces of legislation aimed at improving the environmental management of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and improving the collection, treatment and recycling of electronics: the Directive on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE Directive) and the Directive on the restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment (RoHS Directive). The first WEEE Directive (2002/96/EC) entered into force in February 2003 and a revised version (2012/19/EU) came into effect in February 2014. The first RoHS Directive (2002/95/EC) came into effect in February 2003, with a recast (2011/65/EU) coming into effect at the start of 2013.

• The European Commission published The raw materials initiative - meeting our critical needs for growth and jobs in Europe (COM(2008) 699 final) as a first step towards helping the EU form a common approach in the international discussion on raw materials, building on an in-depth analysis carried out by the Commission in 2008, and on the results of a public consultation held during the same year.

• The Raw Materials Initiative was followed in 2009 by an Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee on the Non-energy mining industry in Europe (2009/C 27/19), and in 2011 by an Opinions on Processing and exploitation, for economic and environmental purposes, of industrial and mining waste deposits in the European Union (CCMI/087) and by a Communication on Tackling the challenges in commodity markets and on raw materials (COM(2011) 25 final) in 2011.

• At the end of 2011, the Commission issued the Staff Working Paper Materials Roadmap Enabling Low-Carbon Energy Technologies (SEC(2011) 1609 final). This was followed in June 2013 by recommendations to the SET-Plan Steering Group and to the European Commission in the form of a paper on the implementation of the Materials Roadmap. In support of the Materials Roadmap, the Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s in-house science service, produced a series of scientific assessment reports covering various renewable energy technologies. These reports are available for download on the SETIS site.

• The European Energy Research Alliance organised a seminar to discuss a potential Basic Science for Energy Joint Programme in May 2010, after which a first document was produced and an awareness event was organised to widen interest in this JP initiative. Meetings were held in 2011 at which it was agreed that the areas where European research would be the most effective would be basic materials science, physical chemistry of processes, heat and mass transfer phenomena and dedicated powerful tools to characterise materials and energy devices. The JP was later renamed as the Advanced Materials and Processes for Energy Applications (AMPEA) joint programme.

• In 2011, the Institute for Energy and Transport at the Joint Research Centre published a study on Critical Metals in Strategic Energy Technologies to assess potential bottlenecks to the deployment of low-carbon energy technologies in the EU arising from shortages of certain metals. The study examined the use of metals in six low-carbon energy technologies, namely: nuclear fission, solar photovoltaics, wind, bioenergy, carbon capture and storage and the electricity grid.

• On November 29, 2011, the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC) agreed to a Raw Materials Work Plan, which includes preparation of a joint inventory of mineral raw materials data and analysis maintained by both sides. As part of this effort, the two sides were instructed to consider the results of ongoing European Commission and United States government studies of raw materials resource availability, trade flows, and criticality and of other supply and demand analyses, such as the 2010 European Commission Report by an ad-hoc expert group on critical raw materials and the U.S. Department of Energy Critical Materials Strategy.

• In 2011 the EU, Japan and the US launched a trilateral dialogue to promote cooperation in the field of critical materials. Within this context, a series of Trilateral Conferences on Critical Materials have been organised. The first conferences were organised in Washington (October 2011) and in Tokyo (March 2012) and the third such conference was held in Brussels in May 2013. The fourth Trilateral Conference on Critical Materials, which covered topics in the rare earth industry, source discovery, new materials research and deployment, and processing and recycling technologies, was held in Iowa, in the U.S. in September 2014.

• The Energy Materials Industrial Research Initiative was set up in 2012 to drive forward research and innovation in the advanced materials needed for low-carbon energy applications. By bringing together research, industry and trade organisations, and leveraging Europe's world-class capability in advanced materials, EMIRI aims to contribute to generating tangible growth in economic value and employment opportunities for Europe.

• M-ERA.NET, an EU-funded network to support and increase the coordination of European research programmes and related funding in materials science and engineering, was set up in 2012. M-ERA.NET aims to complement existing instruments and contribute to EU policies while supporting the exploitation of knowledge along the whole innovation chain, from basic research to applied research and innovation. The project aims to develop long-term cooperation between funding organisations across the EU. Cooperation with partners outside Europe is targeted at building a global network of public funding programmes.

• In line with recommendations from the Transatlantic Economic Council, an EU-U.S. Expert Workshop on Mineral Raw Material Flows and Data was held in Brussels on 12 - 13 September 2012. This workshop formed part of an ongoing effort in response to an EU initiative to set up a mechanism to collect raw materials data and analyse materials flow for EU countries. This was followed by another workshop in November 2013, hosted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

• The European Innovation Partnership on Raw Materials was set up in 2012 as a stakeholder platform bringing together representatives from industry, public services, academia and NGOs. Its mission is to provide high-level guidance to the European Commission, Members States and private actors on innovative approaches to challenges related to raw materials.

• In 2013, the JRC's Institute for Energy and Transport published a report entitled: Critical Metals in the Path towards Decarbonisation of the EU Energy Sector. This analysis of 17 energy technologies identified thirty-two materials as significant and, when market and geopolitical factors are taken into account, eight of them were given a high criticality rating, namely: the rare earth elements - dysprosium, europium, terbium, yttrium, praseodymium and neodymium; gallium and tellurium. Furthermore, an additional six were considered to have a medium-to-high risk and should be monitored closely: graphite, rhenium, hafnium, germanium, platinum and indium.

• The Materials Information System (MIS), which is hosted by SETIS, was established in 2014 to provide relevant information on the materials used in SET-Plan technologies, including background information on the technology itself, the material’s supply chain, which materials and how much material is used in each technology, descriptions of the materials themselves, both scientific and technical, as well as a library of relevant references, links and other literature.

• The European Commission’s Ad Hoc Working Group on defining critical raw materials issued a Report on Critical Raw materials for the EU in May 2014. The purpose of this report is to revise and extend the work carried out in the 2010 report mentioned above, in order to produce an updated list of critical raw materials. This was followed, also in May, by a Communication ‘On the review of the list of critical raw materials for the EU and the implementation of the Raw Materials Initiative’ (COM(2014) 297 final). This Communication presents the new list of critical raw materials and provides an overview of the upcoming activities related to the Raw Materials Initiative, the European Innovation Partnership on Raw Materials and the part of Horizon 2020 that concerns raw materials.

• During the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) 2014 Conference, the European Commission's JRC organised a session entitled: "Raw materials supply: a bottleneck in the transition to a low carbon energy system". Distinguished speakers discussed the future demand and supply potential for raw materials used in energy technologies based on the expected technological development and market shares and addressed the potential risk to the EU decarbonisation and mitigation options.

• The European Commission is currently preparing a contractual public-private partnership (cPPP) on “Advanced materials enabling energy technologies”. This new initiative is a contribution to the New Commission’s Agenda for Jobs, Growth, Fairness and Democratic Change, in particular as an effort to create deeper and fairer internal market with a strengthened industrial base. The aim is to promote industrially-driven R&I actions aligned with the EU2020 objectives, the Integrated Energy Roadmap and the industrial needs throughout the advanced materials value chain in order to shorten the time to market for enabling energy technologies and to stimulate long-term R&I investments of the industry in the EU. This initiative will enable stronger and more complete value chains to drive competitiveness and to restore the EU’s industrial leadership in strategic energy technologies.

General SET-Plan news

• The 7th Conference of the European Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan), organized by the Italian National Agency for New Technologies (ENEA) under the auspices of the Italian Presidency of the Council of the EU, took place at the Auditorium Antonianum in Rome on 10-11 December 2014. The Conference provided a unique forum for experts, researchers, producers, stakeholders and representatives of national and EU institutions to have in-depth discussions on the future developments of the SET-Plan needed to respond to the energy challenges ahead.

• A SET-Plan Steering Group meeting was held in Brussels on 13 November. The main item for discussion at the meeting was the development of the SET-Plan Integrated Roadmap and Action Plan.

• The Joint Research Centre (JRC) has published a report on a system-based approach to assessing the value of wind for society. This report was based on a workshop held in Petten, the Netherlands earlier, the scope of which was to create and enhance a comprehensive list of social, environmental and economic elements which could or should be included in any analysis of the value of wind energy to society, depending on the purpose of each individual analysis. The workshop report is available for download on the SETIS website.

• The Joint Research Centre’s Institute for Energy and Transport hosted a workshop in October on power-to-hydrogen and hydrogen and compressed natural gas (HCNG), as part of an initiative launched by the European Association of Research and Technology Organisations (EARTO), the European Standards Organisations (ESO) CEN and CENELEC, together with the European Commission Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry (ENTR). This initiative was launched within the context of the European Forum on Science and Industry, to bring the scientific and standardisation communities closer together. The event was driven by the goal of providing European standardisation organisations with scientific input to ensure that European standards take into account economic competitiveness and societal needs such as environmental sustainability and safety and security concerns.

• The Joint Research Centre and the Ministry of Energy and Industry of Albania held a joint workshop on the future role of energy storage in South Eastern Europe in October 2014 in Tirana. The workshop is part of the Enlargement and Integration Action, in which the JRC is playing an important role by providing scientific and technological support through a number of activities. The participants actively discussed the technical, financial and regulatory challenges of the energy systems of the Western Balkans, and options for how these could be overcome. The presentations can be accessed on the workshop section of the SETIS website.

• The Joint Research Centre held a workshop in December 2014 on addressing flexibility in energy system models. The workshop aimed to gather experts from modelling teams dealing with the challenges facing the energy system of the future. These challenges include the effects of intermittent energy sources on the reliability and adequacy of the energy system, the impacts of rules governing the curtailment or storage of energy, and how much backup dispatchable capacity may be required to guarantee that energy demand is safely met. The workshop examined these problems from different perspectives, ranging from system-wide to detailed sectoral energy models, in order to share and compare modelling approaches and results, identifying gaps and potential solutions. Presentations from the workshop are available on the SETIS website.