The current high-speed deployment rate of non-programmable Renewable Energy Sources (RES) is making transmission network planning activities more and more complex and affected by a high level of uncertainty. Because network investments are capital intensive and the lifetime of the infrastructure spans several decades, it may happen that when a new line is commissioned it is no longer the best option and it might be partially regarded as a stranded cost. There is an on-going debate on the selection of the more effective technologies that could contribute to system flexibility. This category doesn’t only include grid technologies, but also storage elements and flexible demand, both located in transmission or provided by opportunely aggregated distributed energy sources located in distribution networks. FlexPlanning aims at creating a new tool for optimizing transmission and distribution grid planning, considering the placement of flexibility elements as an alternative to traditional grid planning. This approach aims at helping to reduce overall power system costs i.e. infrastructure deployment and operation costs, the latter in terms of procurement of energy and system services. FlexPlan is going to take into account environmental impact and footprint (impact on air quality for thermal generation, carbon footprint, impact on landscape of new T&D lines). A pre-processing tool is also created to determine location, size and associated costs for storage and flexible demand candidates. The new planning tool is first validated and then used for analysing six detailed regional scenarios at 2030-2040-2050 in order to assess the potential role of storage and flexible resources. Pan-European scenarios are preliminarily elaborated in order to provide border conditions for the regional cases. Regulatory conclusions are drawn to analyse whether opportune incentivisation procedures could be put in place by the regulators wherever some consistent advantages are demonstrated.

Four European TSOs of Central-Eastern Europe (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia), associated with power system experts, electricity retailers, IT providers and renewable electricity providers, propose to design a unique regional cooperation scheme: it aims at opening Balancing and Redispatching markets to new sources of flexibility and supporting such sources to act on such markets competitively. Thanks to a prototype aggregation solution and renewable generation forecasting techniques, flexibility providers – distributed generators (DG) and Commercial and Industrial (C&I) consumers providing demand response (DR) – are enabled, through retailers acting as flexibility aggregators, to provide competitive offers for Frequency Restoration Reserve (including secondary control activated with a response time between 30 seconds and 15 minutes). A comprehensive techno-economic model for the cross-border integration of such services involves a common activation function (CAF) tailored to congested borders and optimized to overcome critical intra-regional barriers. The resulting CAF is implemented into a prototype Regional Balancing and Redispatching Platform, securely integrated within the four TSOs’ IT systems: this makes research activities about cross-border integration flexible while linking with the aggregation solution. Use cases of growing complexity are pilot tested, going from the involvement of DR and DG into national balancing markets to cross-border competition between flexibility aggregators. Based on past experience with tertiary reserve, participating C&I consumers and DG are expected to provide close to 40MW of secondary reserve. Impact analyses of the pilot tests together with dissemination activities towards all the stakeholders of the electricity value chain will recommend business models and deployment roadmaps for the most promising use cases, which, in turn, contribute to the practical implementation of the European Balancing Target Model by 2020.

Nowadays, the adoption of a single and unified electricity market [1] is one of the main challenges faced by Europe. Although the Western and Northern regions of Europe have been working for several years towards reaching such objective, the South-Eastern region of Europe has not followed the same roadmap and it not as advanced in this field as Western Europe. TRINITY will address this challenge in order to improve the current situation and facilitate the interconnection of South-Eastern electricity markets - among them and also within the current Multi Regional Coupling area (MRC). TRINITY will develop a set of solutions to enhance cooperation among the transmission system operators of SEE in order to support the integration of the electricity markets in the region, whilst promoting higher penetration of clean energies. This strategic goal will be driven by end-users (8 TSOs, 4 NEMOS and 1 RCC) and will be achieved through the deployment in the region of four independent, but complementary, products: T-Market Coupling Framework; T-Sentinel Toolset; T-RES Control Center and T-Coordination Platform.

Six TSOs, eleven research partners, together with sixteen industry (manufacturers, solution providers) and market (producers, ESCo) players address, through a holistic approach, the identification and development of flexibilities required to enable the Energy Transition to high share of renewables. This approach captures synergies across needs and sources of flexibilities, such as multiple services from one source, or hybridizing sources, thus resulting in a cost-efficient power system. OSMOSE proposes four TSO-led demonstrations (RTE, REE, TERNA and ELES) aiming at increasing the techno-economic potential of a wide range of flexibility solutions and covering several applications, i.e.: synchronisation of large power systems by multiservice hybrid storage; multiple services provided by the coordinated control of different storage and FACTS devices; multiple services provided by grid devices, large demand-response and RES generation coordinated in a smart management system; cross-border sharing of flexibility sources through a near real-time cross-border energy market. The demonstrations are coordinated with and supported by simulation-based studies which aim (i) to forecast the economically optimal mix of flexibility solutions in long-term energy scenarios (2030 and 2050) and (ii) to build recommendations for improvements of the existing market mechanisms and regulatory frameworks, thus enabling the reliable and sustainable development of flexibility assets by market players in coordination with regulated players. Interoperability and improved TSO/DSO interactions are addressed so as to ease the scaling up and replication of the flexibility solutions. A database is built for the sharing of real-life techno-economic performances of electrochemical storage devices. Activities are planned to prepare a strategy for the exploitation and dissemination of the project’s results, with specific messages for each category of stakeholders of the electricity system.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of the continuity of vital services, has shown the need to work together for the common good. It has proven that a pandemic is not only a health crisis and that it does not only disrupt Critical Infrastructures (CIs), but that there is an extremely important link between the resilience of CIs and our societies. The economic crisis caused by the pandemic also provides a unique opportunity to jointly ‘build back better’ with the focus on sustainability and green recovery. SUNRISE will facilitate active collaboration of CIs across Europe to share best practices and jointly tackle future pandemics. By Q3/2025, this collaboration will result in a new stable working group for resilience to pandemics with at least 100 members. With a group of 4 CI authorities, 16 CI operators, 3 other CI stakeholders, 4 experts in Social Sciences and Humanities, 2 experts in epidemiology and climate extremes, and 12 security researchers and SW developers, we will: (1) Identify pandemic-specific vital services and CIs, their dependencies, risks, cascading effects, and effective measures to tackle them at European level. (2) Develop a comprehensive strategy (TRL8) and four innovative tools (TRL7) ensuring greater availability, reliability, security, robustness, trustworthiness, cost-effectiveness, climate-friendliness, and continuity of pandemic-specific vital services in Europe: Tools for risk-based access control, resource demand prediction and management, cyber-physical resilience, and remote infrastructure inspection. (3) Pilot the results in operational environments of the CIs while tackling some of their biggest pain points exposed by the current pandemic. (4) Promote our approach across Europe to ensure a united front and resilience of CIs to pandemics. We will carefully consider legal, ethical, societal, economic, and climate aspects, ensuring that our results address not only the needs of the CIs, but also those of our society.