Time and money key to greening Europe’s research infrastructures, says new ESFRI chair

Time and investment are the key to making Europe’s research infrastructures greener, more sustainable and more resilient to fluctuating energy prices, says the new chair of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). 

José Luis Martínez took up the post in January and over the next two years will navigate several challenges, including managing the energy crisis and preparations for the next ESFRI roadmap, which outlines the development of new infrastructure projects and will be published in 2026. 

Last year, ESFRI reported that 80% of 173 research infrastructures were struggling with higher energy prices, primarily caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. On top of paying the bills, around 50 were facing shortages of key materials and consumables.

With no signs of the war ending, Martínez told Science|Business the energy problem persists. “Maybe not as bad as it was two years ago because there have been responses and measures, but it is still significant,” he said. 

Research infrastructures are located all over Europe, and in general the primary funding responsibility falls on the host member state. That means there is no simple answer to the challenges they face and each country “has to find its own solution,” Martínez said. 

It is also the case that the infrastructures come in many shapes and sizes. Some of the most well-known are the large, single site facilities such as CERN or the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble. But others are distributed, meaning they have facilities in several countries. Some are virtual, such as the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) based in Norway, which relies on data coming in from all over Europe to feed its online platform. 

This further complicates the strategy for steering research infrastructures through the energy crisis. “[They] are diverse,” Martínez said. Those most affected by the energy crisis are the “typical physics-based single site infrastructures such as accelerators, or high-performance computers.”

One approach ESFRI and Martínez advocate is to fix longer-term energy contracts. It used to be common to have five-year contracts, but these are rarer and rarer now. 

Another is to reduce energy consumption. But said Martinez, “In order to do that, you need time and investment.” 

For example, when France’s ESRF was upgraded it took over seven years between 2015 to 2022 and cost around €150 million. The complex project involved installing four new beamlines and enhancing the existing ones. The upgrade improved the energy efficiency of the facility. 

Similarly, the new MareNostrum 5 supercomputer in Barcelona is both more powerful and consumes less energy than older models, but comes at a cost of €151 million. 

In the worst cases, over the past couple of years, some research infrastructures have had to close for extended periods or reduce their running time to cut the energy bills. 

ESFRI is planning a study this year to investigate ways to make research infrastructures greener and more sustainable. Built-in sustainability could become a requirement for new projects applying for the roadmap in the future. 

The next roadmap

Every five years ESFRI publishes a roadmap as a guide to the best new research infrastructure projects. This helps in coordination, making sure resources are used efficiently and that European researchers have access to the state-of-the-art facilities.

A new roadmap is due in 2026 and good progress is being made. ESFRI has nearly completed landscape analysis of the network across Europe, including the impact of each facility. ESFRI expects to present this in the first half of this year. 

Another step in the design of the new roadmap is an evaluation of ESFRI’s 41 ‘landmarks’ – the well-established research infrastructures that featured in previous roadmaps. 

Their diversity means this evaluation is long and complex. ESFRI has completed the review of 12 research infrastructures and Martinez hopes to finish this work by the end of 2024. 

“The monitoring of the landmarks is very important for the new roadmap because we need to be sure that the so-called landmarks are really […] at the cutting edge of technology and are really making an important contribution to the research interests of Europe,” Martínez said. 

Once the landscape analysis and landmark monitoring are complete, ESFRI will put out the call for projects to apply to be on the new roadmap, with the plan to present that roadmap by the end of next year or the beginning of 2026.