ELBE EUROCLUSTER - Eurocluster in Offshore Renewable Energy

The Financial Support To Innovation (FSTI) of ELBE EUROCLUSTER is now open!

The call will fund eight projects that respond to eight different challenges in the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) sector. The cascade funding for these challenges is of 60.000€ per project.

The challenges have been defined together with large companies (ORE stakeholders) called Challenge Owners. They commit to collaborate with the SMEs selected to answer to their challenge. They will be involved in the selection process and participate to at least three meetings with the selected SMEs. On top of that, they will have the possibility to contribute further (in-kind contributions such as access to testing facilities, access to skills, or other type of support). A Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) will be signed to ensure property rights.

Here you can find the titles and the topics of each challenge:

1. IBERDROLA (Spain): Transfer to sea methodologies - Installation: 
2. NAVANTIA (Spain): Support and Monitoring of Commissioning and Maintenance Activity - Commissioning and Maintenance Activities for Offshore Substations. 
3. OCEAN WINDS (Poland): Multi-task versatile UAV system to support underwater offshore O&M activities within an Offshore Wind Farm - Operation & Maintenance. 
4. OTARY (Belgium): Offshore Wind Planning Optimizer considering RT production forecasting - Offshore digitalisation. 
5. QAIR (France): Birds anti-rest effect solution - Environment. 
6. VATTENFALL (Denmark): Cargo drone approach to the nacelle - Drone approach to nacelle. 
7. SEATWIRL (Sweden): Control system development for floating Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) - Control system. 
8. ORSTED (Denmark): Improved data collection for the purpose of customs reporting - Data collection. 

Target audience

The target audience of the ELBE Eurocluster call for FSTI is European innovative SMEs from the ORE sectors and/or developing projects/services on the ORE sectors presented hereinafter as part of ORE domains and challenges: digital transition, ecological transition and resiliency. Applicants shall be established in one of the following eligible countries: EU-27, Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway. Proposal applications from cross-border consortia (SMEs from different EU Member states) are favoured by additional points in the evaluation of the applications. To search for SME partners visit the ELBE Alliance's website.

Deadline and application

Applications shall be submitted by 30 September 2023, 05:00 pm CET at the latest, on the EU Survey platform: https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/ELBEFSI2023.

For more information about the submission toolkit and each challenge description, please consult the documents you will find in the following link.