The European Commission declared that climate change and environmental degradation are an existential threat to Europe and the world. To overcome these challenges, the European Green Deal will transform the EU to modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy, with the key pledge to reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. This requires, among other measures, (a) higher share of renewables and (b) bringing down emissions and energy costs for customers and industry.

In this context, ISOP will deliver significant advancements and innovations in sCO₂ power cycles by developing measures from technology solutions, with guidance and decision-making tools for their implementation, and it will also integrate regional efforts to avoid duplication or fragmentation and will have an EU-wide dissemination policy. To this end, the project will embed the Salzburg II Recommendations & the Principles for Innovative Doctoral Training within the design of both the scientific and transferable skills training programmes. This will further develop and spread best practice in European collaborative research training programmes through tailored dissemination and public engagement plan.

The history of supercritical Carbon Dioxide cycles originated on both sides of the Atlantic, as a result of the works by Gianfranco Angelino (Italy) and Edward G. Feher (USA), though to contribution of the former is usually acknowledged to be more relevant and wider in scope. After thirty years without worthwhile work on the topic, the technology was put back on the spotlight in the USA by Vaclav Dostal (a member of the ISOP consortium). Since then, the most relevant contributions towards demonstrating the technology at lab-scale and, later, towards scaling-up have been made in North America whilst research and development efforts in Europe were initiated some ten years later. Yet, whilst the activities in North America and, to a much lesser extent, Asia are strongly focused on the operation of MW systems, the work in Europe makes emphasis on exploring new concepts and applications that can actually enhance the cost-effectiveness and wider utilisation of these innovative power systems. This reveals a large innovation potential of R&D activities in Europe.

From the considerations above, ISOP will, for the first time in the history of sCO₂ technology, put twenty institutions together to advance the technology in order to resolve the key technical challenges that still stand out: i) integration of sCO₂-based power plants into different energy sources, since most R&D activities limit to major components and not Balance of Plant and auxiliaries (tackled by WP1); ii) transient operation and controllability of sCO₂ -based power plants, including fast/safe start-up/shutdown (tackled by WP2); iii) enhanced performance of components not only in base load but also across the entire operating range (tackled by WP3); iv) maturation of components through capital cost reduction and corrosion-life extension (tackled by WP5).

ISOP is therefore a first-of-a-kind project since, for the first time, the most salient technology gaps of sCO₂ systems are tackled together in order to make great strides in the pathway to market deployment. The fact this is jointly carried out by a group of twenty EU institutions at the same time, working in a concerted manner, will boost the innovation potential in our continent in different areas: knowledge, new concepts for power generation and energy storage, operational features, modelling/simulation tools, new materials, coatings, component design…