Europe: Mobility & Energy.
Background
The Small Call is a new pilot aimed at European SMEs with innovative urban mobility products, services, and solutions that can be brought to market within 12 months from the start of the project.
10 SMEs will each be awarded funding of up to 60k EUR for projects that address one of these key challenge areas:
- Mobility and Energy
- Sustainable City Logistics
- Future Mobility
Mobility & Energy
Replacing internal combustion engines with cleaner fuel-propulsion solutions requires new vehicle technologies, charging/refuelling supply as well as generating demand for the fuels. This challenge requires new partnerships, new business models and new infrastructure.
The widescale adoption of electric vehicles in urban areas poses challenges relating to appropriate charging infrastructure for transport such as taxi, truck, small delivery vehicles, bus, boat, moped, e-bike as well as private cars. Alternative fuels to replace combustion include but are not limited to, hydrogen fuel-cell, battery electric vehicles, hydrogen combustion, biogas and battery energy storage for and for V2X technologies.
Solutions may address:
- Demonstration of smart grid/micro grid energy infrastructure for all types of vehicles of the future. Particular attention should be given to alternative energy including hydrogen, solar and biofuels.
- Implement and test charging of universal cable/cableless solutions for all mobility vehicles e.g., with multimodal interchanges or bus lanes/stops being example of early adoption sites.
- Accelerate the use of solutions that speed up the decarbonisation of public transport. This could include the allocation of charging and refuelling stations that support transport authorities’ purchasers and public transport operators.
- Implement innovative products/services that increase the use of zero-emission vehicles, showing a clear take-up of vehicles.
- Innovative cooperation models and new business models for charging solutions to test new load balancing techniques, fast and slow charging solutions, and behavioural incentives (e.g., lower cost for lower power),
- Billing/ fintech solutions to service MaaS or new cross-border alternative fuel networks launched in Europe.
- Solutions or hardware products designed to radically diminish the mobility sectors dependence on Battery electric vehicles to attain net zero. This may be solutions that lower energy consumption, manage assets more efficiently to new battery types or materials, and hybridization.
Published on 20 January 2023