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One Network for Europe

The scope of OneNet is to create a fully replicable and scalable architecture that enables the whole European electrical system to operate as a single system in which a variety of markets allows the universal participation of stakeholders regardless of their physical location – at every level from small consumer to large producers. 

The project, led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, brings together a consortium of over 70 partners. Check out the full list here. In addition to a significant list of grid operators, the consortium also includes key IT players, leading research institutions and two European associations for grid operators, all of whom jointly provide unique expertise in support to these challenging tasks.  

The project “OneNet” (One Network for Europe) is funded through the EU’s eighth Framework Programme Horizon 2020 titled “TSO – DSO Consumer: Large-scale demonstrations of innovative grid services through demand response, storage and small-scale (RES) generation” and responds to the call “Building a low-carbon, climate-resilient future (LC)”.

Background

While the electrical grid is moving from being a fully centralized to a highly decentralized system, grid operators have to change their operative business to accommodate for faster reactions and adaptive exploitation of flexibility. 

The topic has been the subject of several research projects in the past and has reached a level of maturity that allows for some final considerations, and the proposal of an integrated view on grid operations. 

OneNet aims at performing this critical step by creating the conditions for a new generation of grid services able to fully exploit demand response, storage and distributed generation while creating fair, transparent and open conditions for the consumer.  

As a result, while creating “one network of Europe”, the project aims to build a customer-centric approach to grid operation. This ambitious vision is to be achieved by proposing new markets, products and services and by creating a unique IT architecture.  

The project has also very ambitious goals aiming at creating consensus on its proposed solution far beyond the limits of the consortium partners thanks to a variety of actions including a large-scale forum (namely “GRIFOn” for discussion with the European energy community) for discussion within the international energy community.

Elering’s participation

As Elering is participating in the OneNet project via several horizontal workflows, the main focus is on two activities. Firstly, the finalisation of the regional Estonian-Finnish-Latvian-Lithuanian flexibility services platform as a follow-up to the results of the projects of EU-SysFlex and INTERRFACE.

The goal is to improve the access of flexibility on the electricity market and to increase the volume of active flexibility. A novel technological component being elaborated at the initiative of Elering is the TSO-DSO coordination platform.

Secondly, a Pan-European data management model is being created in order to ensure the interaction of various data exchange platforms. The objective is to ensure the availability of various energy data, including sensitive private data, controlled sharing and accessibility, regardless of where in Europe the owner of the data and the receiver of the data are located. In order to provide the simplest and most efficient sharing of data, the existing platforms, including Elering’s Estfeed, must be connected.

Horizon