BRIDGE 2025 Brochure highlights the progress in Europe’s Energy Innovation

BRIDGE brochure

The European Commission’s BRIDGE initiative has released its 2025 brochure, presenting an in-depth review of the strategic projects and collaborative frameworks that are accelerating Europe’s clean energy transition. For stakeholders in digitalisation and smart grid innovation, like the ones involved in DATA CELLAR, this updated edition offers valuable insights into the EU’s most ambitious research and innovation (R&I) efforts.

Launched at the end of May 2025, the new brochure provides an overview of the 202 active and completed projects united under BRIDGE. These projects span critical domains such as Smart Grids, Energy Storage, Digitalisation, and Islands, are co-funded by the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes. With 123 active projects, over 2,000 participating organisations, and €1.6 billion in EU funding, BRIDGE represents a powerhouse of coordinated research driving both technological advancement and policy development.

Bridging innovation and market uptake

The brochure opens with a foreword from the European Commission, which emphasises BRIDGE’s strategic role in aligning R&I outcomes with emerging EU policy frameworks. Recent initiatives like the Clean Industrial Deal (2025), the Affordable Energy Action Plan, and AI-driven programmes such as Gen AI4EU and ApplyAI are cited as instrumental in shaping Europe’s next-generation energy infrastructure.

These frameworks highlight the EU’s dual commitment to decarbonisation and economic competitiveness, placing BRIDGE at the intersection of innovation and implementation. By fostering cooperation among projects and consolidating their outputs, BRIDGE ensures that promising solutions, such as smart grids and interoperable data platforms, are not siloed but scaled and shared across borders.

A snapshot of Europe’s energy R&I landscape

Compared to previous years, the 2025 edition reflects notable growth, an increase of over 10% in project count since 2024. Since its inception in 2016. BRIDGE has seen an eightfold rise in the number of projects, show casing the deepening investment and engagement in collaborative energy research across the EU and associated countries.

The brochure’s structure is both accessible and data-rich. It provides a detailed chronological overview of every BRIDGE project since 2016, categorised by their funding calls. A key feature is the fact sheet format for each ongoing project, outlining essential data: funding, technical goals, demonstrator locations, key exploitable results, and technologies used.

For instance, DATA CELLAR is one of the several featured under the theme of digitalisation and data interoperability. Other notable themes include EV smart charging, renewable integration, grid flexibility and consumer empowerment.

Focus areas and technological highlights

The 2025 brochure segments projects into technology domains. According to the analysis:

  • Grid technologies account for 25% of the BRIDGE projects focus, with strong interest in monitoring and control systems, microgrids, and network management.
  • Distributed storage technologies make up 18%, with solutions ranging from EV batteries to thermal storage.
  • Consumer-oriented technologies (16%) include demand response, smart metering and smart appliances.
  • Generation technologies, such as PV systems and wind turbines, represent another 16% complemented by large-scale storage and market infrastructure services.

Importantly, the brochure’s insights are drawn from projects implemented in over 27 countries, with Spain, Greece, Germany, Italy and France leading in demonstrator deployments. This wide territorial spread reflects the EU’s commitment to inclusive and balanced innovation.

Empowering policy and practice

At the core of BRIDGE lies a powerful coordination mechanism: four Working Groups focusing on Data Management, Business Models, Consumer and Citizen Engagement, and Regulation. These groups consolidate lessons learned across projects and issue practical recommendations to EU policymakers. Their collective output has become a valuable asset in shaping more effective, harmonised policies for energy system transformation.

In this sense, BRIDGE goes beyond a project cluster, it is an engine for policy-driven innovation, converting research insights into tangible change on the ground. The DATA CELLAR project, with its emphasis on open data and federated infrastructure, contributes to this ecosystem by enabling the digital backbone that many BRIDGE projects now depend upon.

Download and explore

The BRIDGE 2025 brochure is more than a catalogue, it’s a strategic map of Europe’s energy future. Whether you are a researcher, policymaker, technology provider, or energy community representative, the document provides a wealth of knowledge on where Europe is heading in terms of smart, resilient, and citizen-driven energy systems.

Download the full brochure here.

For more on DATA CELLAR’s role within the BRIDGE initiative, visit our project page or follow us on LinkedIn.