With EU support, Cork is pushing forward climate-action research

The city of Cork is pressing ahead with a range of EU-supported projects to reduce its carbon emissions.

Cork is providing ten pilot sites for a project that began whose purpose is to demonstrate the energy- and carbon-saving potential of combining electric storage heating with solar panels and electric storage batteries. This is the Interreg North West Europe RED-WOLF project, which began in January 2019.

In October 2019, two additional climate-mitigation research projects started. Both are funded by the EU's Horizon2020 research programme. One, MINI-STOR, seeks to demonstrate the value of a device that can store energy and release it as heat and electricity. The other, Build Upon2, aims to boost low-carbon retrofitting, empowering cities across Europe to join forces with national governments and industry to decarbonise their existing building stock by 2050.

Additionally, Cork continues to advise the Interreg North Sea Region project INDU-ZERO on the design of a blue print for a 'smart factory' whose products would reduce the costs of retrofitting.