EMPHASIS Concludes: Sustainable Supercapacitors and Three Years of RISE Support
After three years of work, the EU funded project EMPHASIS has concluded, delivering a new generation of sustainable, high performance supercapacitor technologies for smart textiles and electromobility. RISE was part of the consortium throughout, leading communication, dissemination and exploitation activities and working alongside the coordinator on overall project monitoring and organisation.
Supercapacitors charge and discharge far faster than batteries and survive many more cycles, which makes them attractive wherever short bursts of power matter. Their limitation has been energy density, and the materials used to build them often depend on critical raw materials. EMPHASIS set out to address both. Coordinated by Pleione Energy S.A. in Greece and funded under Horizon Europe with a budget of roughly 5.4 million euro, the consortium worked from material level to system level: bio based electrode materials, metal free current collectors, high voltage ionic liquid electrolytes with validated recycling routes, and the manufacturing processes needed to produce them at industrially relevant scale.
Those materials were integrated into fully functional supercapacitor pouch cells and tested in two demonstrators. In the automotive case, supercapacitors supported hybrid fuel cell and battery architectures under realistic load profiles. In the smart clothing case, flexible supercapacitors delivered short term high power to emergency communication modules embedded in wearable safety garments. Life cycle assessment and cost modelling indicated eco efficiency gains of around 30 percent, and key technologies advanced to TRL 5 and 6.
What RISE contributed
Within EMPHASIS, RISE led the work packages covering outreach and communication as well as exploitation, including intellectual property management, while supporting the coordinator on the day to day running of the project.
In practice, that meant building and maintaining the project website and social media presence, producing newsletters, partner interviews and audiovisual content that turned laboratory results into narratives non specialist audiences could follow, and keeping a consortium of 14 organisations from six European countries aligned on deliverables, reporting cycles and review preparations. On the exploitation side, RISE guided partners through identifying, protecting and managing the intellectual property generated by the research, and helped map out routes towards uptake beyond the project's lifetime.
RISE also organised the final review and stakeholder meeting held in Brussels on 10 and 11 December 2025, bringing consortium partners, the European Commission and external experts together to assess three years of results and discuss where the technology goes next.
Why this project mattered to us
EMPHASIS is the kind of project RISE was built for: a large, multidisciplinary consortium where the technical work is only as valuable as the structures holding it together and the pathways that carry the results outward. Managing that complexity, communicating it clearly and preparing research outputs for uptake sits at the centre of what we do.
With the project now archived and its public deliverables and publications available online, the EMPHASIS results remain accessible to researchers, industry and policy audiences working on Europe's energy storage challenges.
For more information, visit the website.
