Project InteGrid organises events to gather industry and consumers during the month of July

Project InteGrid organises events to gather industry and consumers during the month of July

The European project Integrid, coordinated by EDP Distribuição and in which INESC TEC is the technical coordinator, organised the event entitled “From Intelligent Energy Solutions to Disruptive Business Models” on 27 June at EDP headquarters in Lisbon.

06th July 2018

The event was a meeting point for dozens of European institutions related to the energy sector, from enterprises linked to the industry, such as General Electric, Águas do Tejo Atlântico or SAP, to power distribution enterprises such as EDP Distribuição, or to institutions and enterprises related to research, namely INESC TEC, CNET (Centre for New Energy Technologies), KTH or the University of Comillas (Madrid). The goal was to present the best in the energy field in Europe.

Project Integrid joined the activities promoted by the European Commission entitled Energy Days, in order to organise this event. Energy Days are events that take place between May and June and aim to show the importance of sustainable energies to citizens and industry.

With the exception of the welcoming address from the project coordinator, Pedro Godinho Matos, from EDP Distribuição, and from the keynote speaker Jorge Vasconcelos of NEWES (New Energy Solutions) who opened the afternoon session, the remaining interventions were part of one of the four panels: the academia and technology viewpoint in the morning, and stakeholders viewpoint and emerging technology from SME or start-ups in the smart grids domain in the afternoon session.

The academic panel was composed of Pablo Frias from ITT of the University of Comillas, Ricardo Bessa, assistant coordinator of INESC TEC’s Centre for Power and Energy Systems (CPES) and technical coordinator of the project InteGrid, and Hossein Shahrokni from KTH. Pablo Frias reflected upon the new business models for the smart grids, and that for each stakeholder involved in this process, namely the energy distributors, consumers or wholesalers, it must correspond completely different models. As for INESC TEC’s researcher, he focused his presentation on the analytical models, namely about the prediction and modeling of the flexibility of the consumption, the monitoring of LV grid integrated in the smart grid ecosystem. Finally, the researcher from KTH addressed the issue of the consumer engagement and the modification and adoption of new behaviours related to electrical energy consumption.

Six institutions took the stage for the second session, the technology viewpoint. The participants demonstrated to the audience solutions that they are developing within the project. General Electric, through Monica Pintado and Benoit Christophe, presented an advanced distribution grid management system, Christoph Gutschi from CyberGrid, demonstrated a virtual power plant, SAP with German Mesa, presented a predictive maintenance system with data analytics functions, Claudia Abreu, from INESC TEC, presented the home energy management system, Águas do Tejo Atlântico, in the person of Rita Alves, presented the Portuguese demonstrator on exploring the flexibility of water treatment plants in order to increase the energy efficiency and to provide system services; and CNET, through Pedro Castro and Filipe Guerra, presented the living laboratory in Évora (Valverde) in order to test and to develop new concepts related to the small-scale energy storage systems.

The opening session began with Jorge Vasconcelos of NEWES, who issued several challenges to the audience, namely in terms of the challenges for the digitalisation of the energy sector.

The stakeholder’s panel, which was led by EDP Distribuição (Ferreira Pinto), had the participation of Jorge Esteves from the Energy Services Regulatory Authority (ERSE), Jorge Mendonça e Costa from the Portuguese Association of Large Energy Consumers (APIGCEE), Albino Marques from REN and Júlia Seixas from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

The last panel decided to give the opportunity for 10 startups and/or national SME to express themselves. “Our goal was to bring together small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a strong technology and R&D component and large companies and also to present them the opportunities that the demonstrators of the project InteGrid can foster. That is why we launched an international challenge and we selected 10 enterprises of those who applied. Márcia Pereira, from Bandora Systems, Jed Cohen from Energie Institut, Carlos Jesus from EVolution, Fernando Fernandes from INFRAENER, João Pinto from Ionseed, Sílvio Rodrigues from jungle, José Mota from Lightenjin, Rodrigo Amaro e Silva from SOLROM, Srilakshmi Gopal from Trigger Systems and Miguel Carvalho from Watt-is presented solutions.

Ângelo Sarmento, member of the Board of EDP Distribuição closed the session.

The launch of the Portuguese demonstrator of Caldas da Rainha took place on 4 June

On 4 June, project InteGrid organised an event at Caldas da Rainha aiming to bring closer the consumers and the stakeholders (municipality) of the project. The session began at 14:30 p.m. with a workshop conducted by EDP Distribuição to the consumers and continued with the official launch of one of the four demonstrators of the project in Portugal.

This project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the number 721218.

The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC.