Groundbreaking digitization project for European grid operators

Oldenburg, 13 December 2019 – With its project FuturePowerFlow for grid operators, the software developer energy & meteo systems is one of seven German and in total 75 European companies selected last week by the European Innovation Council as worthy of funding. The companies are supported within the IEC-Accelerator program with more than 278 million euros. The goal of energy & meteo's two year promoted project is the exact planning capacity of grid integration from renewable energies for a time period of 48 hours through the processing large amounts of highest-speed data. For the first time, this gives grid operators the ability to recognize potential bottleneck threats in the electricity grid at an early stage and take proactive countermeasures.

Software platform facilitates Redispatch

Currently and with increasing frequency, grid bottlenecks lead to costly and unnecessary curtailment of green energy from wind and solar sites. With FuturePowerFlow, energy & meteo systems is developing a software platform which allows for intelligent grid planning and optimization of load flow for the first time. Here, power predictions from renewable energies, operational conditions within the grid, load forecasts and local grid loads from individual sites as well as power plant scheduling are brought together to calculate the vertical grid load and load flow in advance for the grid operator. This makes the timely planning and execution of concrete redispatching measures possible. Thanks to the modular design and data exchange via modern API's, the platform can be expanded with modules according to the purpose of the application at hand. "We are especially happy about the support from the European Innovation Council. With this lighthouse project, we are advancing the digital energy transition, as we use modern software technologies to avoid grid bottlenecks through renewable energies", explains Dr. Matthias Lange, managing director at energy & meteo systems.

Within the project, the Oldenburg company is to conduct several pilot projects over the next two years together with European grid operators and will test application cases in real-life operations. Thanks to the support, the required expansion of company internal structures as well as the world-wide marketing of FuturePowerFlow can be quickly advanced.

Through EU funding, novel products are to reach the market faster, generating jobs and growth. The funding instruments target market creating innovations that make way for groundbreaking products, services, processes, and business models. They are meant to open new markets with great potential for growth in the EU and beyond.