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Home / Horizon Europe / HORIZON-CL5-2027-05-D4-06

Thermal energy optimisation and waste heat recovery of high energy demand IT rooms in buildings or small edge data centres

Announced, not yet open · HORIZON Innovation Actions · HORIZON-CL5-2027-05-D4-06

Next cut-off
15 Sept '27
in 374 days
Per grant
€5.3M
the call's own average
Grants expected
3
projects that will be funded
Funding rate
70%
the rest is your own money

In context of Horizon Europe

This grant€5.3M
The track runs to the largest grant in Horizon Europe (€171M). The median across the 482 calls we publish is €5.3M, this one is above it.

What this call funds

Expected Outcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

  • Improved open access to performance data, sharing of best-practices and useful knowledge and information for owners and operators of IT infrastructure, as well as the IT and building sectors;
  • New designs of IT rooms in buildings or small edge data centres valorise waste heat through thermal management techniques, processes and tools.

Scope:

The growing energy needs of the ICT sector must be met while aligning with climate neutrality and sustainability goals. Small IT rooms or small data centres are an essential part of the twin green and digital transition. It is important to address the energy and resources consumption over the full ICT value chain. Solutions already exist, such as re-using waste heat from data centres, or moving towards circular models (longer lifetimes, reparability, reuse and recyclability). Most recent analysis suggests that the energy consumption of consumer devices in 2020 accounted for roughly 50% of the overall energy consumption of ICT technologies, with the two next largest contributors being respectively the production of ICT devices (~20%) and the operation of data centres (~15%)[1]. Moreover, this is expected to change dramatically by 2030, as the overall energy consumption of ICT technologies is expected to increase by 50% over this decade. The Commission has set the strategic goal of ensuring that data centres are climate-neutral, energy- and resource efficient by 2030. However, most efforts are directed towards data centres in scope of the Energy Efficiency Directive recast.

Proposals should address all of the following:

Trimmed here, the full scope, expected outcomes and award criteria are on the official topic page ↗.

What applying costs you

ItemEstimateNote
Drafting effort6–8 weekssingle submission
Partner search4–8 weeksruns in parallel, and it is the part that slips
Your own money€2.3M30% of project cost, over the project's life
Time to first payment6–9 monthscut-off → evaluation → grant agreement

These are Bemzu's estimates from the call's structure (the number of stages and whether a consortium is required) not figures published by the Commission. Only the co-financing share is read from the call itself.

Where these conditions come from

Two kinds of row. Most are the sentence we read the condition from, quoted out of the call itself. Some say plainly that they are not a quotation but the programme's own rule for this type of action, the EU portal publishes a table of contents where the conditions should be, so for a Research and Innovation Action the rate comes from the rulebook rather than from the fiche.

ConditionQuoted from the call, or the rule behind it
Consortium sizeNot quoted from this call — Innovation Actions under the Horizon Europe rules are at least three independent legal entities from three different Member States or Associated Countries, at least one established in a Member State.
Funding rateNot quoted from this call — Innovation Actions under the Horizon Europe rules are funded at 70% of eligible costs for profit-making organisations, and 100% for non-profit legal entities — the rate shown here is the one that applies to a company.
Maturitynull Activities are expected to achieve TRL 6-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

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