Energy Awards 2017: The REstable joint European power grid research project receives an award

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The winners of the 2017 Energy Awards received their prizes at the Museum for Communication in Berlin on September 28. With its partners in France, Portugal and Germany, the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Technology (IWES) in Kassel received the special prize European Energy Project for the European power grid research project »REstable – grid-stabilizing system services in the electricity network of the European power grid control areas«.

 

With this special prize, the Energy Academy rewards an outstanding project from other European countries which acts as flagship project for the whole of Europe.

The general objective of the German-French-Portuguese project REstable is the identification of the essential technical, economic and regulatory challenges and problems in the transition of the European power supply system to renewable energy sources and the establishment of suitable solution strategies to develop long-term, economically feasible mechanisms.

The REstable project had already been awarded the German-French Innovation Prize for Renewable Energy Sources in June 2016. The project consortium includes the following research institutions and companies: ARMINES MINES-ParisTech, Artelys, ENERCON, Fraunhofer IWES, HESPUL, HydroNEXT, INESC, TEC, Maïa Eolis, and SolarWorld.

Securing grid stability during the expansion of the fluctuating generation of electricity with renewable energy sources:

So far, conventional power stations have provided so-called ancillary services to stabilize the power grids and maintain the frequency and voltage within narrow limits. With the expansion of the renewable energy sources, these ancillary services must gradually incorporate  wind energy, photovoltaic, hydraulic energy and biogas plants.

However, in European countries, the technical and regulatory conditions for this are still very different. The REstable project aims to show that by linking the plants intelligently at the European level, these tasks can be solved more efficiently. To accomplish this, so-called virtual power stations will facilitate the necessary transnational interconnectedness through modern information and communication technologies.

A virtual combined power station is a modular real-time system that allows renewable energy plants to be monitored, controlled, aggregated and optimized according to various strategies.

In the future, many such virtual power stations will make ancillary services with renewable energy sources available and operate in a European network. In principle, the solutions developed in the project can be transferred to other countries and adapted to the most varied regions.

Against the background of a European scenario of 100% renewable energy sources, the transferability to the entire European ENTSO-E integrated grid will be examined in order to derive from it milestones for converting the European energy supply to renewable energy sources.

For more information (in German) visit:

https://www.energiesystemtechnik.iwes.fraunhofer.de/de/presse-infothek/Presse-Me...
http://www.energiesystemtechnik.iwes.fraunhofer.de