The technological breakthroughs within the BRIDGE initiative
The BRIDGE initiative brings together projects funded by Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe Projects in the fields of smart grid, energy storage, islands, and digitalization. The community has 155 projects and reunites around 1100 project partners from 42 countries, though 58 of these projects already ended on the 1stof July this year. There has been a remarkable increase in the number of projects involved in BRIDGE, which had only 24 when it was launched. In total, the EU funding amounts to almost 1.4 billion EUR devoted to the projects.
Main activities within BRIDGE
There are 4 working groups or types of activities within the initiative: data management; regulation; consumer and citizen engagement; and business models. These activities are described in the BRIDGE 2023 brochure as partially indicated here:
Data management: is focused on the communication infrastructure for data exchange, data integrity, data exchange and data analytics for data processing, among other key aspects.
Regulation: consist on cross-border and regional cooperation, the integration of market-based and non-market-based flexibility mechanisms, and the coordination of the flexibility markets for system services.
Consumer and citizen engagement: it comprises an analysis of the geographical and social dimensions, the drivers for the effectiveness of engagement activities, and the identification of trigger sources of behavioural changes.
Business models: evaluation of innovative business models, comparison of the profitability of different business models related to smart grids and energy storage solutions.
The stakeholders
There are also different types of stakeholders participating in the initiative:
- Consumers
- Regulated operators - Transmission System Operators (TSOs) and Distributed System Operators (DSOs) –
- Regulators or National Regulatory Authorities
- Local energy communities
- Power technology providers
- Research and innovation stakeholders
- Energy suppliers, aggregators and market operators
- Others
Technologies and solutions tested
Regarding the technologies and solutions that are being tested, these are divided into several groups: technologies for consumers, like demand response and smart appliances; grid technologies, such as grid inertia and network management; large-scale storage technologies usually connected at transmission level, like hydro storage; small-scale storage technologies normally connected at distribution level, such as batteries and electric vehicles; generation technologies, for example, wind turbines or photovoltaic; and other activities.
Demonstrations or pilots tests of technologies and solutions are hosted by 39 countries. Spain is the country with more demo sites with a total of 60, followed by other EU and non-EU countries, as stated in the BRIDGE 2023 brochure.
CyberGrid's EU funded projects
Our team participates in the development and implementation of several EU funded projects, which are gathered within the BRIDGE initiative, such as the InterConnect (2018), MAESHA (2020), SENERGY NETS (2021), STREAM (2021), and InterSTORE (2022) projects.
Furthermore, it has previously worked on the following projects encompassed within the same initiative: Flexiciency (2014); Future Flow (2015); InteGrid (2016); CROSSBOW (2017); and Magnitude (2017).
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