A cluster of eleven research and innovation projects, funded under the same call of the EU’s H2020 programme, are developing breakthrough and game-changing renewable energy technologies that will form the backbone of the energy system by 2030 and 2050 are, at present, at an early stage of development. These projects have joined forces at a collaborative workshop, entitled ‘ Low-TRL Renewable Energy Technologies’, at the 10th Sustainable Places Conference (SP2022), to share their insights, present their projects’ progress and achievements to date, and expose their approach for exploitation and market uptake of their solutions.

DRIvE (Demand Response Integration Technologies) is a research and innovation project funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Program, whose main objective is unlocking the demand response potential in the distribution grid. DRIvE presented how the use of digital twins de-risks the implementation of demand response applications at the “Flexibility 2.0: Demand response and self-consumption based on the prosumer of Europe’s low carbon future” workshop within the conference “Sustainable Places 2020”. This workshop was organized to cluster and foster knowledge transfer between several EU projects, each developing innovative solutions within the field of demand response, energy flexibility, and optimized synergies between actors of the built environment and the power grid.

A cluster of eleven research and innovation projects, funded under the same call of the EU’s H2020 programme, are developing breakthrough and game-changing renewable energy technologies that will form the backbone of the energy system by 2030 and 2050 are, at present, at an early stage of development. These projects have joined forces at a collaborative workshop, entitled ‘ Low-TRL Renewable Energy Technologies’, at the 10th Sustainable Places Conference (SP2022), to share their insights, present their projects’ progress and achievements to date, and expose their approach for exploitation and market uptake of their solutions.

Heat-to-Fuel is a 48-month research and innovation project, funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 (EU H2020) Framework Program, which the main objective is to deliver the next generation of biofuel production technologies supporting the decarbonization of the transportation sector by integrating its novel technologies together with innovative activities on design, modeling, development of hardware and processes, testing and life cycle analysis of a fully integrated system. The Heat-to-Fuel concept consists of a biorefinery that combines hydrothermal liquefaction, aqueous phase reforming and Fischer–Tropsch processes to convert wet and solid organic wastes into 2nd generation biofuels with the highest efficiency. Having reached almost 75% of the Heat-to-Fuel project’s execution, a review on the main research outcomes and publications derived from the Heat-to-Fuel project activities are presented within this paper.