Mapping of IEA TCPs

For more than 40 years, the research collaboration programme of the International Energy Agency (IEA) provides a legal framework for international cooperation. Today, about 40 Technology Collaboration Programmes (TCPs) are reporting to three working parties – one for renewables, one for fossil fuels and the third one covering all end use sectors – and one coordination group for nuclear fusion. This management structure provides IEA's Committee on Energy Research and Technology (CERT) with all the necessary information to supervise this part of IEA activities.

CERT and working parties are challenged by the huge amount of horizontal and vertical international cooperations in various topics and sectors. To get a better overview and to identify possible gaps and overlaps, the Austrian Energy Agency (AEA) had been appointed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) to gather, analyze and last but not least visualize the relevant data.

Firstly, the existing and publicly available information of the Energy Technology Network itself has been processed. Secondly, the public IEA database for RD&D expenditures/budgets proved complementary and was very valuable for this purpose. In addition to this data, a set of 35 methods has been developed to classify the type of activity carried out. Most of the TCPs are sub-structured in different dedicated activities – eventually 185 of them have been recorded. Linking all the above mentioned data sources into one graph data model resulted in a model with 499 nodes and 5,711 different relationships between these nodes.

The qualitative and quantitative analysis carried out brought some new insights:

• The general focus of activities was clearly on applied research.
• Activities in TCPs provide strong support for policies and legislations, but also testing and standardisation.
• TCPs are very active when it comes to bringing technologies to the market and deploy them.
• There was substantial work on consumer behavior and behavioral change, but no focus on the consumer as the subject (prosumer, privacy issues). No single activity covered data issues (protection of data privacy) as an important aspect of digitalization.
• When covering possible energy policy goals, environmental aspects in general, GHG reduction and last but not least safety and health issues are well covered. But security of supply as a systemic issue is almost not addressed.
• Looking at the end use sectors, there are comparably quite low activities in industry.

The results of this exercise had been presented to and discussed with the End-Use Working Party and the Working Party for Renewable Energy Technologies at their meetings in March 2018. The question was raised if the TCP network has established appropriate communication structures in and between TCPs and working parties to make best use of TCPs' results and public money countries are investing in them. The intention of this report is not only to describe the methodology, selected results and some findings in more detail but to enable interested parties to make use of the graph-based database which is open source. Data was collected and assessed in September 2017.