CONNECT aims to provide concepts, technologies and components that support enhanced integration of renewables and storage combined with intelligent control of the power flow. The demand for primary energy and the carbon dioxide emissions will be reduced and a decentralized energy infrastructure will be facilitated by these solutions. CONNECT investigates new concepts and technologies for power conversion that will be specifically developed for bidirectional power exchange with the grid and for controllable power flow in order to support the extended integration of renewables like PV and local storage. Power quality optimization will be explored in order to avoid unnecessary energy flows in the grid. The enhanced capabilities of the power conversion fit seamlessly to the smart energy management systems researched in CONNECT applicable for single/multiple buildings and quarters. Monitoring approaches and advanced control algorithms will be developed which take into account renewable energy sources, local storage and electric vehicles for peak demand reduction and optimization of local generation, consumption and storage. In order to fully exploit the advantages of the aforementioned technologies it is necessary to enhance the data transmission capacity of the smart grid communication infrastructure. For this purpose CONNECT will develop solutions for high interoperable, high data rate local and wide area communication in the grid with enhanced security in order to protect this critical infrastructure against attacks. Particular effort is spend to minimize the power consumption of the developed solutions. Selected results of CONNECT are planned to be demonstrated not only in lab environment but also in close to real life scenarios.

Progressus supports the European climate targets for 2030 by proposing a next generation smart grid, demonstrated by the application example “smart charging infrastructure” that integrates seamlessly into the already existing concepts of smart-grid architectures keeping additional investments minimal. The expected high-power requirements for ultra fast charging stations lead to special challenges for designing and establishing an intelligent charge-infrastructure. As emission free traffic concepts are a nascent economic topic also the efficient use of charging infrastructure is still in its infancy. Thus, novel sensor types, hardware security modules, inexpensive high bandwidth technologies and block-chain technology as part of an independent, extendable charging energy-management and customer platform are researched for a charging-station energy-microgrid. Research of new efficient high-power voltage converters, which support bidirectional power flow and provide a new type of highly economical charging stations with connected storage and metering platform to locally monitor the grid state complements the activities. The stations are intended to exploit the grid infrastructure via broadband power-line as communication medium, removing the need for costly civil engineering activities and supplying information to the energy management solutions for utilization optimization. Smart-Contracts via block-chain offer a distributed framework for the proposed energy management and services platform. Furthermore hardware security hardens the concept against direct physical attacks such as infiltration of the network by gaining access to the encryption key material even when a charging station is compromised. Progressus solutions are estimated to enable a carbon dioxide saving of 800.000 tons per year for only Germany, will secure the competitiveness of European industry and research by extending the system know how and will thus safeguard employment and production in Europe.