The project addressed the challenges posed by the need for vulnerability evaluation and contingency planning of the energy grids and energy plants considering also the relevant ICT systems used in protection and control.
Project emphasis is on cascading events that can cause catastrophic outages of the electric power systems.
The project developed a modular smart metering platform. The system provides a service exchange channel that helps the interaction between end users, market representatives, electricity networks operators and ICT providers. The system helps energy remote metering in areas such as electricity, gas, heating and cooling. It also allows a more efficient use of electricity networks and turn end-users into active energy market players.
The project aimed to develop a demand response management platform that introduces scalability and adaptiveness into toolkits aggregating energy data. The system integrates multiple strategies and policies from energy market stakeholders, rendering it a modular and future-proof solution.
The project aims to empower consumer to become active participants in the energy markets via:
a) A legacy and Standards-compliant interoperability framework to interconnect building energy loads/appliances.
b) A human-centric, intelligent building energy management system.
c) Innovative business models and service offering for energy retailers.
The ELECTRA Integrated Research Programme on Smart Grids brought together the partners of the EERA Joint Programme on Smart Grids (JP SG) to reinforce and accelerate Europe's medium to long term research cooperation in this area and to drive a closer integration of the research programmes of the participating organisations and of the related national programmes.
Based on the results from the ERIGrid-1 project, the successor project ERIGrid 2.0 will expand the research services and tools of European research infrastructures for validating smart energy networks with the electric power grid as the main backbone. Committed to the holistic and cyber-physical systems-based validation approach, ERIGrid 2.0 will foster system-level support and education for industrial and academic researchers in power and energy systems research and technology development.
The project designed and deployed a flexible, multi-utility, multi-service metering architecture in two demonstrators. Simple off-the-shelf meters have been placed at the users for electric, thermal and gas metering; they communicated with a building concentrator, where the “smartness” of the metering system will reside. A central cloud system collected data from the building concentrators and from MV/LV substation meters.
The project aimed to conduct a fully integrated assessment of new grid-impacting technologies and their implementation into the European electricity system. This allowed comparing different technological options towards the exploitation of the full potential of future electricity production from renewable energy sources (RES-E), with the lowest possible total electricity system cost.
The project developed a set of criteria, metrics, methods and tools to assess how the transmission infrastructure should be optimally developed to support the achievement of a reliable, competitive and sustainable electricity supply in the EU. The project moves along three axes: identification of performances and costs of new technologies, preparation of a roadmap for the incorporation of new transmission technologies into the electricity networks and evaluation of the overall benefits of transmission expansion investments.