Image courtesy Swissgrid
The TSO Innovation Alliance has issued its first open call for solutions to help build a climate-resilient power grid.
The Alliance, launched in July by eight European transmission system operators (TSOs) – Swissgrid, Elia Group, 50Hertz, TenneT, Terna, RTE, Red Eléctrica and Amprion – is now reaching out to technology providers, start-ups, scale-ups, research institutes and established companies for collaboration.
According to the Alliance, climate-driven events, storms, floods, heatwaves and wildfires are increasing in frequency and severity, placing new demands on grid operations and long-term planning.
Traditional methods and static assumptions are no longer sufficient when faced with rising uncertainty and rapidly changing conditions, they say. Thus the Alliance is inviting the technology community to accelerate practical solutions that can be deployed and scaled across Europe.
Guiding this call are two urgent topics:
- Weather-aware system operations
According to the Alliance, extreme weather is no longer an incident, it is an operational reality. Control rooms must anticipate risks earlier and act faster, shifting from reactive measures to proactive, data-informed operations.
While n-1 and n-2 contingency checks remain important, the Alliance says that operators increasingly need early warnings, probabilistic impact assessments and actionable guidance across time horizons from month-ahead to real-time.
The Alliance is thus seeking weather-aware diagnostic systems that detect and diagnose the operational impact of events such as icing, lightning, salt pollution, floods, wildfires or extreme wind.
Additionally, they are looking for multi-horizon forecasting and decision-support tools that combine meteorological forecasts with grid vulnerability models and produce recommended actions (e.g. redispatch, topology adaptations and targeted alerts) that fit control-room workflows.
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- Climate-proof network planning and investment
The Alliance says that intensifying climate hazards challenge long-term planning assumptions. Additionally, relying on historical data alone risks underprotecting assets or oversizing investments.
Thus, TSOs need robust, scenario-based insights to balance resilience, cost-effectiveness and system reliability across new builds and existing infrastructure.
For this, the Alliance is seeking advanced climate scenarios and hazard maps (European coverage, up to approximately 50 years) that show where and how risks will materialise.
Additionally, they are seeking planning and investment decision support that can be integrated into existing TSO processes and platforms, providing information on routing choices, retrofit/upgrade priorities and economically efficient resilience strategies.
Selected technology providers will collaborate directly with the eight member European TSOs of the Alliance, have the chance to fast-track their solutions into Proofs of Concept with operators and gain an opportunity to scale solutions across borders.
Details about expected pilot outcomes and integration preferences are available on the Open Call page.
