Flexibility and power system operation top European TSOs’ research agenda

Research is already a business support activity of Europe’s TSOs in the energy transition ENTSO-E has found in a survey of 117 projects.

The monitoring survey, aimed to provide a holistic overview of the research, development and innovation (RDI) activities in the region’s energy transmission sector, finds that the research activities are already addressing the majority – over 80% – of the more than 80 milestones in the organisation’s RDI roadmap for 2020 to 2030.

These 117 projects declared a total of 192 ‘key exploitable results’.

Of these the majority are innovative methodologies (29%) and software tools (28%) followed by hardware (15%), while their most frequent effective use is public (41%) and collective (30%) with only limited commercial (4%).

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In terms of Technological Readiness Levels (TRL), most of the projects at their end are expected below TRL 8 but there is a significant concentration at TRLs 7 and 9, with the most frequent expected time to exploitation of less than 5 years.

However, the regulatory framework followed closely by market conditions were cited as the most significant barriers to the use of results, accounting together for almost half of the responses to barriers.

ENTSO-E says in its report that the findings show the deep commitment of TSOs towards carbon neutrality and the strong alignment with the Green Deal and the REPowerEU action plans.

The RDI roadmap identified six ‘flagship’ TSO research areas, viz. optimising cross-sector integration, developing an ecosystem for deep electrification, enhancing grid use and development for the pan-EU market, enabling large-scale offshore wind integration into the grid, enabling secure operation of widespread AC/DC grid and enhancing control centre operation and interoperability.

Within these the highest coverage is observed in the development of the deep electrification ecosystem and grid development for the pan-EU market, with high levels of medium coverage in the other areas.

The lowest level of coverage is in the area of offshore wind integration.

The survey also finds that the most frequent benefits arising from the projects are improved network management and decreased carbon emissions.

RDI recommendations

Looking ahead, ENTSO-E recommends that the increased trend of projects aiming at direct public use should be further maintained and monitored, as such an approach might help to embed outcomes and new competencies within the European electricity industry.

However, the increasing pace of electrification of transport needs to be more intensively addressed and research activities also should be boosted towards digitalisation, storage particularly long duration, power-to-X technologies, CO2 footprint and the assessment methodology and metrics of flexibility needs and value at the pan-EU level.

An emphasis also must be placed on activities to enable large-scale offshore wind energy into the grid, with the requirement for significant advancements in the regulatory framework, HVDC modelling tools, technology and materials development as well as system reliability, security and asset management.

Finally, ENTSO-E calls for the milestones of the RDI roadmap to become part of the set of outcomes of the research topics of the Horizon Europe and other funding programmes to improve their alignment and for increase cooperation with stakeholders in all sectors, in particular to dismantle innovation barriers in order to create an environment for innovation uptake.