Month: February 2024

OPENTUNITY Plenary Meeting Sparks Innovation in Energy Solutions in Granollers

OPENTUNITY Plenary Meeting Sparks Innovation in Energy Solutions in Granollers

09/02/2024

On February 6th and 7th, the OPENTUNITY consortium convened for its Plenary Meeting at Anell premises in Granollers, Spain, a pivotal hub within our pilot site network.

The meeting buzzed with energy and enthusiasm as discussions delved into the core pillars of our project: OPENFLEX, OPENGRID, and OPENABILITY. These initiatives signify our dedication to fostering flexibility in the prosumer’s environment, enhancing grid management technologies for DSOs/TSOs, and streamlining procedures to boost interoperability. Furthermore, partners addressed the different use cases in our pilot sites across Spain, Greece, Slovenia, and Switzerland.

Crucially, these deliberations marked pivotal steps towards our forthcoming report to the EU Commission. This report, a culmination of 16 months of dedicated work, represents a significant milestone in our journey towards shaping the future of energy systems in Europe.

Beyond the boardroom, the consortium had the privilege of immersing ourselves in Anell’s facilities—a testament to the evolution from a textile company to a dynamic DSO. This firsthand experience provided invaluable insights into the practical applications of our work, grounding our discussions in real-world contexts.


Spanish pilot site prepares to test OPENTUNITY’s uses cases

Spanish pilot site prepares to test OPENTUNITY’s uses cases

02/02/2024

ANELL partner, the lead partner for the Spanish pilot site, is prepared to star testing the OPENTUNITY’s use cases. After a period identifying challenges in the company’s grid and defining corresponding solutions, the Catalan DSO initiated the process of delineating the pilot site’s activity area. This mainly covers municipality of Santa Eulàlia de Ronçana, a town located in the county of Vallés Oriental (Barcelona), spanning 14 km2 with a mix of urban and rural areas. ANELL manages almost 80km of Low Voltage (LV) lines, 30km of Medium Voltage (MV) lines and is supplying around 2.500 Smart Meters.

Santa Eulalia de Ronçana was selected based on the high frequency of non-technical losses in the area and the amount of residential photovoltaic solar panel installations, around 120 with a maximum power capacity of around 1 MW. This aligns with ANELL’s main concerns of minimizing losses and maximizing service quality.

OPENTUNITY’s Use Cases will be very valuable for ANELL in addressing different challenges. Some will focus on determining discrepancies on grid’s topology and estimating the state of the network to tackle the low observability in the LV grid, facilitating the identification of discrepancies and faults. Others will address strategies for managing the recent increase of Distributed Energy Resources (DER), different strategies to deal with congestions and loss of capacity due to this massive penetration will be done.

There is also an emphasis on supporting the energy transition by fostering demand-side flexibility to handle congestions and mitigate the impact of DER.

Finally, other use cases will focus on detecting of non-technical losses along the grid, calculating MV lines capacity due to thermal variations, and enhancing system reliability and resilience by identifying critical assets and developing aging and failure models.

These efforts collectively address ANELL’s main needs forming the core of the Spanish Pilot.

Pilot site in Spain.

ANELL premises in Granollers, Barcelona.