Over the past year, OPENTUNITY has moved from developing its innovations to putting them to the test in real distribution grids, households, and energy markets. Across four pilot sites in Greece, Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland, the project deployed and demonstrated its full set of tools for grid operators, prosumers, and flexibility markets under operating conditions. Work package 6 (WP6), coordinated by the University of Ljubljana, marks the point where years of design and development met the complexity of the real world.

A coordinated, evidence-based demonstration

Demonstrating a large set of innovations across four countries required careful coordination. Building on the demonstration plan defined in the first phase of WP6, each pilot worked through a structured set of test cases, with progress tracked systematically across all sites through regular coordination meetings. A dedicated monitoring process kept close watch on the datasets flowing from pilot partners to the technology developers, ensuring that every tool had the data it needed to be tested properly. In total, more than fifty test cases were executed, each documented with concrete evidence of what was deployed, how it was demonstrated, and what the outcome was.

Connecting tools to real infrastructure

Turning a working prototype into a tool running on live infrastructure is not straightforward. Sensors had to be installed on transformers and power lines, data pipelines built between utility systems and the project’s platforms, and software connected to everything from household heat pumps to EV charging stations. This integration effort, often the least visible part of a project, was essential groundwork that made the demonstrations possible. – UL, Work Package 6 coordinator.

Results from across the four pilots

Each pilot brought something distinct to the project. Here are a few highlights, with more detailed pilot-focused articles to follow in the coming months.

• In the Greek pilot, HEDNO and IPTO demonstrated a flexibility market on the NODES platform that coordinated needs between the transmission and distribution operators, alongside a transformer health-monitoring tool that flagged real anomalies across high-voltage assets.
• In the Swiss pilot, AEM and its partners ran a local flexibility market for an energy community in Massagno that operated continuously and autonomously across 49 trading days, matching bids and dispatching real assets without manual intervention.
• In the Spanish pilot, ANELL operated a real-time thermal rating tool live on a 40 kV overhead line for roughly ten months, while a state estimation tool gave the operator visibility into low-voltage grids that are normally difficult to observe, reaching voltage estimation with very high accuracy.
• In the Slovenian pilot, smart charging of a shared EV fleet cut the gap to optimal charging cost by more than half in two months of real operation, while a network planning tool showed that even modest flexibility could defer grid reinforcement investments by several years.

What comes next

These demonstrations provide the evidence base for the next phase of the project, where OPENTUNITY will formally assess the impact of its innovations against the project’s targets. In the meantime, watch this space for upcoming articles taking a closer look at each pilot and what it achieved.

Deliverable 6.1