• AENEAS, an initiative in which Fundación Valenciaport participates, has a budget of nearly 5 million euros, co-financed by the Horizon Europe program

• The initiative will develop three types of solutions for electrical energy storage on ships: solid state batteries, supercapacitors and a combined system

Valencia, 4th October 2024. – A team from Fundación Valenciaport has traveled this week to Brussels to participate in a follow-up meeting of the AENEAS project, ‘Innovative Energy Storage Systems Onboard Vessels’.

The overall objective of this project, which began in January last year, is to contribute to a more environmentally friendly and climate neutral maritime and inland waterway transport through new state-of-the-art clean energy storage solutions.

The initiative, in which Fundación Valenciaport participates along with 13 other European entities, has a budget of nearly 5 million euros, co-financed by the Horizon Europe project of the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA).

Specifically, AENEAS will develop innovative electrical energy storage systems (ESS) that will provide simpler and more cost-effective solutions than traditional batteries to improve overall energy efficiency and drastically reduce emissions from shipping vessels.

To achieve this, AENEAS is developing three types of solutions: solid-state batteries for constant load water transport applications; supercapacitors for marine and river transport applications to reduce peak energy demand and peaks during charging; and a hybrid system, which combines the above for water transport applications requiring high energy and power density energy storage solutions.

These solutions enable electric shipping, in whole or in part, taking into account the conditions that specific vessels may face, including adverse conditions outside sheltered waters or up rivers.

AENEAS will evaluate these electrical energy storage systems for a range of applications and end-uses, both in short sea shipping and inland waterways, and will define the trajectory of these for application on different types of vessels. In addition, the project will define a roadmap for full-scale on-board demonstrators of two such energy storage systems expected by 2027.

For the development of the project, Fundación Valenciaport will advise on the connection of the batteries to the grid and enable the use and validation of these technologies through its extensive network of maritime industry contacts.

AENEAS Consortium

In addition to Fundación Valenciaport, the consortium includes: Flanders Make, Commissariat a L’energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives, Avesta Battery & Energy Engineering, Siemens Industry Software, Vaasan Yliopisto, ii2m Unternehmensentwicklung GmbH, Grimaldi Euromed SpA, Inland Shipping, Aristotelio Panepistimio Thessalonikis, Fundacion y Centro Tecnologico Soermar, Formare – Polo Nazionale per lo Shipping, Institute for Sustainable Society and Innovation (ISSNOVA) and Construcciones Navales Paulino Freire.