Brussels, 01/12/2010 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 29 November, the European Commission announced the construction of three new pan-European infrastructure facilities in the energy field, worth an overall investment of around €1.2 billion. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European commissioner for research, innovation and science, declared that “these facilities will enable ground-breaking research and innovation and ultimately they could help to secure the EU's future energy supply. We need to bring research, technology, industry and market implementation closer together and that is the purpose of the European Strategic Energy Technology Plan”. These three infrastructure facilities include the Danish WindScanner wind energy research project, a solar energy facility in Spain in (EU-SOLARIS) and a nuclear research reactor in Belgium (MYRRHA). These three facilities will be part of the Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). The announcement was made by the Belgian Presidency at the ENERI Conference on 29 and 30 November in Brussels. In its updated Roadmap 2010, ESFRI has identified 50 new research infrastructures or major upgrades of existing ones, in order to stay at the forefront of research over the next 10 - 20 years. Their total construction cost amounts to some €20 billion and their operational cost would be around €2 billion per year.
One of the objectives of the Innovation Union is to launch by 2015 the construction of 60% of these priority European research infrastructures, primarily financed by EU member states, but with the support of European Programmes. (B.C./transl.fl)