COVID-19 crisis arrived just at the beginning of the first round of trials. When the project was concluding the first deployments and after the execution of the first experiments, we were forced to handle the unforeseen situation that has blocked activities across the world. In the case of CROSSBOW, the project was forced to reassess its strategy for the last phase of demonstrations. Whilst it was planned that trials would be running until June 2020; it was necessary to extend the activities until the end of October 2020.

The main challenge posed by the crisis was the unavailability of critical personnel to participate in the validation of the project results. Not only it has been impossible to deployed some of the solutions in the field, but most important, some of the end-users – mainly system operators – were forced to follow an strict emergency plan not to jeopardise the supply of energy in the countries participating in CROSSBOW. This led to severe difficulties to interact with some of the most valuable participants of the project, dedicated during the crisis to other urgent and critical tasks to guarantee the seamless operation of the grid.

With the end of the first COVID-19 wave, the project is advancing as much as possible the planned experiments in order to avoid potential issues in the future in case of a second wave leading to a new lockdown.

Moreover, the already established infrastructure for coordination with virtual meetings will still be used until 2021, trying to reduce as much as possible the physical meetings.

RES Dispatchable Unit first version

Over the last months Cobra, fulfilled the first version of RES Dispatchable Unit (RES-DU) algorithms and carried out some preliminary tests. With these first tests, COBRA demonstrates the main functionalities of the RES-DU tool and highlights its adaptability to different plant configurations and operation modes. More information here.

Transnational Demand Side Management

HOPS (TSO in Croatia), NOSBIH (TSO in Bosnia and Herzegovina), CGES (TSO in Montenegro), EMS (TSO in Serbia), and MEPSO (TSO in North Macedonia) have participated in the preliminary demonstrations under the High Level Use case 6 “Transnational Demand Side Management” within the Work Packaged 9. The University of Manchester leads these experiments in order to  suggest solutions to the identified challenges of cross border power transfers in existing and future transmission networks at regional and global level, relying on efficient transnational use of Demand Side Management. Our partner, Antun Andrić from HOPS explains further details in this video.

EUSEW 2020: beyond the crisis

On 25th June, the CROSSBOW project participated in the event of the EU Sustainable Energy Week 2020 “Smart grids and flexibility markets: status of demonstrators and effect of covid-19 on the demo operation and results”, organised by the Regulation Working Group of the BRIDGE initiative. This session presented clear examples of how the current COVID-19 crisis has impacted the research activities of the H2020 projects exploring new flexibility market mechanisms and tools for smart grid operation. CROSSBOW project manager explained tasks impacted, lessons learnt and strategy to overcome the constraints affecting operation and execution of experiments and demos. Watch the video of the event here.