Most large research facilities have been promoted by single member states and are operated by institutes or universities also financed mainly by MS. This creates a scatter picture of available facilities in Europe which brings a lesser effective use of their capabilities and a less useful European investment effort than possible. Although they get used in collaborative projects, the most of its time is being devoted to national activities not necessarily matching the needs of Europe as a whole. This causes that they do not bring as much value as possible to European joint efforts.
The Research Infrastructure WP has the general objective of promoting alignment plus focusing of national research activities through joint experiments carried out in European research facilities and its effective joint use. This WP differs from other RI support schemes since it is oriented to boost an agreed-upon strategic European wide research program, namely the EERA JP Wind. Support for experiments granting procedures will be set in the project with the general objective of supporting the strategic research of the EU as contained in the EERA JP Wind by aligning and focusing on its most relevant topics. The focus and alignment will be gained by means of:
1) Creation of access protocols to selected European research facilities and definition of prioritization procedures for selecting the most urgent and relevant experiments in the European context.
2) Implementation of a technical committee to select the experiments that will benefit the most national research activities and promote cooperation and alignment and to match experiment with the most appropriate European research facility.
3) Funding of selected strategic joint experiments, including infrastructure use, at chosen national facilities supporting national R&D efforts. The promotion will be provided through the creation of awareness about existing facilities and their specific characteristics, the application of common and transparent access procedures for experiment and facility selection and the required support both for the host and the guests. Synergy and effectiveness will be derived from networking for data and exchange of best practices.
By doing this, the joint use of European research facilities shall be carried out in a strategically focused and coordinated way, in which selected nationally operated facilities get employed to run specific high value carefully designed and chosen experiments, to ultimately support coordinated joint research nationally supported actions.
This will, Europe-wide, lead to a more effective use of assets and better support of national R&D efforts that are alignment to a European strategy as required by the SET-Plan and as outlined in the EERA DOW.
The KPIs to measure this activity will be four:
- expected impact of supported action of final LCOE
- MS-EC support alignment
- percentage of support spent in different countries
- number of participants in the networking actions.