Project description

Research Infrastructure Services for ESFRI Energy

The proposed RISEnergy ESFRI project will strengthen strategic coordination within the European energy research infrastructure (RI) landscape and establish the RISEnergy ESFRI Single-Entry Access Portal (REAP). REAP will provide an AI-assisted discovery and navigation environment to help users identify relevant RI services, digital tools, and expertise across the energy domain. The portal will support discovery, guidance, and access preparation, while the RI services themselves will remain operated by their respective parent infrastructures.

Coordinated by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT, Germany), the RISEnergy ESFRI consortium brings together 27 organisations (18 full partners and 9 affiliated entities) from 14 countries over a period of 4.5 years, with a total proposed budget of €8 million. The consortium combines extensive expertise across a wide range of energy technologies, bringing together industry, academia, and research organisations.

Objective

The project aims to consolidate and expand the European energy RI ecosystem through coordinated interaction with ESFRI, SET-Plan Implementation Working Groups, policy-makers, RI operators, and user communities. It will assess future technology and infrastructure needs, identify gaps in RI services, and develop recommendations to support European energy research and innovation (R&I) policies. Particular attention will be given to widening and candidate countries, including Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and Cyprus, with the aim of strengthening their participation in European RI networks.

RISEnergy ESFRI will develop a federated catalogue of RI services, interoperable metadata standards, semantic knowledge structures, and AI-supported discovery capabilities. These assets will enable users to explore complementary RI services and identify suitable access pathways across multiple infrastructures. Through training, dissemination, and stakeholder engagement activities, the project seeks to maximise the uptake and usability of the services developed.

Work packages and REAP architecture

The work plan is organised into five cohesive Work Packages (WP1–WP5) governed by cross-cutting milestones covering strategic coordination (MO1), capacities and expertise (MO2), simplified access pathways (MO3), and training (MO4).

Figure 1: RISEnergy ESFRI work package workflow and integration with the central REAP portal.

Geographical scope

The consortium spans 14 European countries with a targeted emphasis on widening participation for candidate countries, explicitly integrating partner institutions from Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and Cyprus into the core European research infrastructure fabric.

Figure 2: Distribution of the 18 beneficiaries and 9 affiliated entities across 14 European nations.

Overview of the 18 beneficiaries and 9 affiliated entities