The conclusion of the EU-SysFlex European demonstration project

The EU-SysFlex European project reached its conclusion after 4 years and 4 months of collaborative research and demonstrations between 34 partners, in 15 European countries, and at 7 experimental sites.

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R&D provided overall technical management for this project (Marie-Ann Evans, SYSTEME), as well as the management of one of the 3 demonstrations of aggregation and control of decentralised resources - figure below of the Virtual Power Plant- (Ye Wang, SYSTEME), and the management of the final roadmap for the project (Robert Soler, SYSTEME).

Many researchers from the R&D teams (LME, MFEE, OSIRIS, etc.) have made a major contribution to the work on this project, which was financed by the European Union at a total cost of €20M.

​The closing event of EU-SysFlex took place on 7th February on Teams, in order to present all the results on solutions for the incorporation of 50% and more of renewable energies into the European electricity system

 
This work has resulted in 8 key statements which form the core of the final roadmap for the project:

• the requirements for new flexibilities in order to ensure equilibrium and stability
• the services that new technologies can provide,
• more efficient services if decentralised resources are aggregated (EDF work on the VPP)
• and if coordination is flexible between operators of the networks by which these resources are connected (GRT and GRD)
• the new tools and platforms needed to incorporate these innovative services,
• the environmental, economic and regulatory conditions necessary to their development,
• which would also ensure an economic model that would guarantee the necessary investment in flexible means,
• as well as the issues in terms of Data and ICT.

After the opening of the conference by Maroš Šefčovič, Vice-President of the European Commission, the main partners of the project, including EDF via the technical director of the project, Marie-Ann Evans, presented the work that resulted to these statements during a public webinar attended by more than 230 participants, including many representatives of European transmission and distribution network operators, equipment manufacturers, academics, etc.

During the second part of the conference, a round table moderated by Frédéric Simon of Euractiv Bruxelles gave Carmen Munoz Dormoy, director of the R&D Downstream Group, the opportunity to share EDF’s vision with O’Connel representative of the DG ENER at the European Commission, Norela Constantinescu, Head of Innovation at ENTSO-E, Vera Silva, CTO of General Electric Grid Solutions, and Liam Ryan, Innovation Director at EirGrid.

In order to introduce 50% of RE in the European electricity system, most of the technologies are there, some of them still have to show their reliability on a large scale, but the investment signals for their deployment must be clear.

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