TwinEU to pilot digital twins across 11 countries
Image: TwinEU
The Horizon Europe-supported TwinEU project is to demonstrate digital twins tools in eight pilots across 11 EU countries to ensure replicability in different geographical and market settings with a wide variety of use cases.
The project, launched in January, is focused on creating the concept of a pan-European digital twin of the electricity system based on the federation of local twins.
To achieve this, TwinEU proposes to develop an adaptable federated digital twin ecosystem spanning over three different layers, namely an adaptive twins federation layer, a dataspace-enabled data and models sharing infrastructure and the service workbench, where the digital twin applications/services and data storage and computational resources are available for third party access.
These will then be tested in the demonstrators with a focus on digital twinning for four use cases, cyber-physical grid resilience, grid management, operation and monitoring, forecasting and optimal grid and market, and smart coordinated grid planning.
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TwinEU demonstrators
In the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal) pilot, TwinEU will make use of a series of digital twins and a common framework for the interaction between them, oriented to enhance the security and resilience of the whole Iberian energy system, from generation, transmission, distribution and energy markets to final consumers.
In the Eastern Mediterranean region (Greece, Cyprus), through the development of an integrated balancing market optimisation model, the demo aims at providing scenarios for enabling the interconnection of digital twins between the mainland and Crete, as well as the islanded Cyprus power system.
The Hungary demo will develop a digital twin-based artificial neural network conductor temperature monitoring for transmission lines, a co-optimisation algorithm with dynamic transmission line ampacity and intraday products and a market auction platform for transmission capacity auction within the day-ahead/intraday timeframe to enable more efficient use of the grid capacity, especially cross-border.
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The primary aim of the Bulgaria pilot is the environment for grid operators resulting with the rapidly growing penetration of distributed energy resources and will enable low voltage level energy market actors (prosumers, EV chargers, aggregators, etc.) non-discriminatory participation in the process of providing services for the operation of the system.
The activities in the Germany demo focus on key extensions towards grid monitoring, grid planning and end-to-end flexibility management for congestion management with a digital twin based on an existing solution that manages one-third of the German DSO systems and extended with a TSO-DSO interface to provide better TSO visibility on the available DSO level flexibility resources.
The Italian pilot will take place in two locations. In Sardinia, a digital copy of the island’s power system will be updated by means of a digital twin to deliver the real-time status of the physical power system components in high renewable scenarios. The second location is a portion of the Rome metropolitan grid, in which different use cases such as self-qualification for flexibility resources will be tested.
The main objective of the Slovenia demo is to upgrade the existing network operation and stability management process based on increased system observability and controllability. The controllability enhancement will encompass the development of a new fast-frequency response service, while for enhanced observability, real-time static and dynamic security assessment tools will be developed.
The Netherlands-France pilot aims at creating mutual benefits for TSOs and DSOs by providing tools for anticipating and preventing/mitigating instability phenomena under high penetration of renewables and weak network topological/operational conditions. It also will focus on the development of the control room of the future for TSOs and DSOs.
TwinEU is a three-year project with a 77-member consortium coordinated by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Germany.
