On 25 June 2020, MUSE GRIDS participated in a session of the European Sustainable Energy Week titled “Smart Grids and Flexibility Markets: Status of Demonstrators and Effect of Covid-19 on Demo Operation and Results“.

The session was organised by the BRIDGE Initiative,

a cooperation group of Smart Grid, Energy Storage, Islands and Digitalisation Horizon2020 projects, and had representatives from Ielectrix, CROSSBOW, COORDINET, Integrid and naturally MUSE GRIDS. The project was represented by Prof. Johanna I. Hoffken, from the Technical University of Eindhoven, in charge of the social aspects related to the energy communities in our demosites.

Besides from being in BRIDGE, all of these projects have one thing in common: they have sites where their research can be demonstrated and that can serve as example for future contexts. Speakers shared the specific challenges that were encountered by their project demosites during the global confinement period of Covid-19, and how adversities were managed by them and their partners.

The technical issues that emerged ranged from lack of access to demosites and labs, limited resources to deploy the work intended, lack of coherent data on energy consumption – which was certainly different from a usual year. On what concerns international cooperation (a key aspect of an European project), partners of Horizon2020 projects have faced the classic challenges of smartworking we are familiar with: professional and personal lives intertwining, different schedules, a higher number of calls during the day.

According to Johanna Hoffken, MUSE GRIDS has encountered issues on its cooperation with India, as well as the work to be developed there and in the Italian demosite of Osimo. The strategy adopted was to shift as much as possible the work to an online basis, and delaying the activities that could be postponed.

While the projects have all faced issues, they were however different, which made the session an interesting exchange of inputs between the projects; in general, Horizon2020 projects have thrived over these difficulties and could learn to take unexpected developments of this kind in future proposals.

Register here to join the session from 11 to 12.30 on 25 June.