News

One percentage, 21 dams: how to read Cyprus's water figures

Oct. 23, 2026

On 1st September 2026, Cyprus dam levels stood at 39.3%, with 117.9 million cubic metres of water stored, according to figures published by the Water Development Department. A year earlier, the same measure read 15.5%. One number covering 21 dams is easy to repeat and easy to misread. What the percentage measures The headline figure is simple arithmetic: the water stored in all the dams, divided by what they could hold together. The 21 dams have a combined capacity of about 300 million cubic metres, and 117.9 divided by 300 gives 39.3%. Think of a fuel gauge reading the average

WaterAnalytics Waterverse
Could a smart oven host a rogue AI? What the headlines miss about the Internet of Things

Oct. 15, 2026

On 12 October, researchers at Anthropic published a report suggesting that small artificial intelligence (AI) models may be only months away from copying themselves across cheap Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, without needing a data centre. Outlets around the world picked it up, and mainstream media followed suit, as for example, in the recent Philenews article. Yet, beneath the headlines sits a useful lesson about a term that rarely reaches the news: the Internet of Things (IoT). What the research actually says The experiments tested whether AI models could find vulnerable

AI ANTS Horizon Europe IoT Waterverse
Securing critical infrastructure: why fault diagnosis is a security issue

Oct. 2, 2026

On 12 December 2024, the European Commission's Digital Strategy office named WATERVERSE a success story. The figures were concrete: a 15% cut in water losses and a 10% drop in electricity costs from optimised pump scheduling, demonstrated across pilots in six countries over the project's three years. One of those pilots ran in Cyprus, built and operated by PHOEBE. Water loss sounds like an efficiency statistic. It is also, less obviously, a security one. WATERVERSE set out to solve a problem that sounds almost bureaucratic: water utilities don't share data with each other, or even within themselves, as well as

ANTS Horizon Europe SOCIAREM WaterAnalytics Waterverse
The smart buildings skills gap Europe still hasn't solved

Sept. 21, 2026

At this year's Forum on Vocational Excellence in Graz, colleagues from PHOEBE sat in on a workshop run by the BuildSkills Academy. The workshop opened with a number that says more about the smart buildings sector than most product launches do: nearly 300 distinct skills, tracked across a free, EU co-funded platform built to help vocational training providers work out where their courses fall short on green and digital construction competence. Most conversations about smart buildings start with the technology: sensors that track air quality, systems that learn a building's occupancy patterns, dashboards that flag a fault before anyone in

AI CoVE IoT
Designing Renewable Energy Communities Around People: SOCIAREM Webinar to Present Key User Research Findings

Sept. 18, 2026

How can Renewable Energy Communities be designed around the needs, motivations and expectations of the people who participate in them? On Thursday, 24 September 2026, the EU-funded SOCIAREM project will bring together European policy, research, citizen engagement and funding perspectives in the online webinar “Designing Renewable Energy Communities Around People.” The webinar will take place at 17:00 CEST and will be available online and free to attend. Putting people at the centre of the energy transition Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) have the potential to support a more decentralised, participatory and sustainable energy system. However, their success depends not only on

Energy Communities Horizon Europe Innovation Webinar
Cyprus's Water Crisis is turning into an EU Funding Race

Aug. 17, 2026

In February 2026, Cyprus's water reserves fell to a record 13.8% of capacity, a figure we covered in detail when we last wrote about the island's leak-detection challenge on this site. That crisis hasn't gone away; instead, the response to it is now visibly turning into something else too: a funding race, with real money and real deadlines attached. The clearest sign is the scale of investment now moving through Cyprus's water sector. €230 million worth of water infrastructure, technology and water-resource management projects are currently underway, co-financed by the EU under the Thaleia 2021–2027 Cohesion Policy Programme. Alongside new

AI Horizon Europe Seminar
Smarter Comfort, Lower Bills: Inside ANTS Project

Aug. 7, 2026

Heating and cooling is usually the single biggest energy cost in any building and the one most people are least willing to compromise on. Nobody wants to save money by being uncomfortable. That tension, between cost and comfort, is exactly what our completed ANTS project set out to resolve. What ANTS actually developed ANTS is a self-learning HVAC energy management system, a holistic solution for real-time optimal control of heating, ventilation and air conditioning. Instead of running on fixed schedules or simple thermostat logic, it uses multi-objective optimization and advanced forecasting to continuously decide the most efficient way to keep

AI ANTS Innovation LELANTUS
Cutting through the AI hype in Smart Building Management

Aug. 5, 2026

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the default answer to almost every question about the future of building management. Ask about energy savings, safety or operational efficiency and "AI" is usually part of the response. Yet for many professionals in the buildings’ environment, such as engineers, facility managers, developers and the SMEs that serve them, the term has grown so broad it risks losing its meaning. This challenge is not unique to buildings. Earlier this year (April 2026), our Director, Dr George Milis, addressed it in a keynote talk at the WaterLoss 2026 Conference in Rio de Janeiro, organised by the IWA

AI Innovation WaterLoss2026
From Rooftops to Grids: How Citizens Are Powering Europe's Energy Transition

July 24, 2026

Europe's energy transition is often pictured as a story about turbines and transmission lines. In practice, it increasingly starts somewhere much smaller: a rooftop, a neighbourhood WhatsApp group, a town hall meeting where residents decide, together, to install solar panels as a community rather than as isolated households. This is the premise behind the citizen-driven energy transition that the SOCIAREM project - a Horizon Europe initiative in which PHOEBE is a core technical partner - is built to accelerate. Why community solar adoption is harder than it should be Rooftop solar is not new. What's new is recognising that the

Energy Communities Horizon Europe Innovation SOCIAREM
Water Under Pressure: Why Cyprus and the EU need Smarter Leak Detection… Now

July 22, 2026

Water resilience is now an urgent European economic-security priority. Driven by the EU Water Resilience Strategy, an annual EU water infrastructure investment gap of €23 billion, and strict Drinking Water Directive leakage assessment mandates, non-revenue water reduction has moved from a maintenance goal to a regulatory imperative. In Cyprus, acute water scarcity and reservoir levels at 13.8% make smart water network Cyprus deployments essential. PHOEBE leads applied water research initiatives, translating Horizon Europe research on water networks into cost-effective leak detection sensor placement and hydraulic network optimisation for modern water utilities. 1. EU Policy Shift: Drinking Water Directive Leakage Assessment

Horizon Europe PHOEBE

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