SYNERGY at Enlit 2021: The potentialities of SYNERGY Big Data Platform

– Interview with Ugo Stecchi, the Project Coordinator of the SYNERGY project

by Ioana-Emilia Badea [GECO Global]

SYNERGY will attend Enlit Europe 2021 in Milan, Italy, at the end of this month. The three-day event will take place at Fiera di Milano from the 30th of November to the 2nd of December. Enlit, formerly known as European Utility Week, brings together collaboration and innovation to address some of the world’s most critical energy issues. SYNERGY is delighted to be a part of the Enlit community and to be able to attend the event in-person to present the projects’ development and the SYNERGY Big Data Platform.

Ugo Stecchi of ETRA I+D, SYNERGY’s project coordinator, provides us with a sneak peek at what SYNERGY contributes to Enlit and the hopes for the coming year.

What will SYNERGY be showcasing at Enlit more specifically?

The SYNERGY Big Data Platform’s capabilities will be showcased at Enlit. In particular, we’d like to share our achievements in terms of platform performance which can offer some crucial functionalities concerning interoperability, data sharing mechanisms, pre-trained analytics, AI big data sharing, etc. Moreover, additional services for final users, belonging to different categories of energy stakeholders, have been developed on an upper layer of the same platform. They were created to match with the most recent requirements of the energy market services, exploiting the platform’s tremendous potential, and they will be shown at Enlit as well.

What does SYNERGY hope to get out of the Enlit Europe 2021 event?

**Ugo Stecchi – Project Manager Etra I+D**

It is a great opportunity for us to be present at this event, likely the first big physical event in the energy domain after a long season of virtual meetings and isolation. We do hope to share our partial results achieved so far and receive profitable and effective feedbacks from engaged stakeholders and other colleagues and partners that are going to participate. We did a great job in the first period of the project, we are very motivated to share it with the rest of the scientific community, but also with the industrial world and Enlit is the place to be. We’d like also to promote our upcoming open call, it will be published at the beginning of 2022 and we hope to have onboard a talented start-up to collaborate with.

What is your hope for next year, in terms of in-person events?

Being able to return to a normal pre-covid situation is what everyone hopes for the near future and hopefully next year we would be able to recover the classic habits we initially use to design and set up the concept of SYNERGY.

It is not just a matter of having back presential meetings within our consortium, (or, why not, with the granted subjects from the Open Call too) that would be great news, but also of being able to get back in direct touch with other actors to exchange results, knowledge and experiences and contribute to the common development of the state of the art in this sector. On the other hand, SYNERGY has a strong vocation for interacting with external stakeholders through various mechanisms and tools; being able to cooperate face to face with these subjects would certainly be of great benefit to the results of the project.

You can meet us in Milan in person, in the EU project Zone, to find out more about our project and to discuss with us potential collaboration opportunities. Register on circdata.com to get your free three-day guest pass for the event.

The SYNERGY Platform: Grupo Cuerva starts uploading datasets to test and validate use cases

After 22 months since the beginning of SYNGERY’s activity, Grupo Cuerva, one of the Spanish demo-partner for the project, has started the uploading of its datasets in the SYNERGY Platform. This will be used to test and validate several Use Cases related to:

PPA (Power Purchase Agreement) between renewable generators and supply points.
Prosumer flexibility in the Low Voltage Grid, from the point of view of the aggregator and from the DSO.
Grid Asset Management optimisation for predictive maintenance of Grupo Cuerva’s critical assets.

To test it, a complete suite of datasets will be included in the SYNERGY Platform, and it will comprise:

Full LV&MV Digital Twin of the demo electric grid (La Calahorra, Granada), with the location per phase of all the supply points.
Electrical consumption and generation data of all the Smart meters deployed in the demo.
Retailer data of the supply points: tariffs, contracted power, etc.
High-resolution electric data of the devices located in the secondary substation: voltages, currents, active and reactive power, etc.

Thanks to the SYNERGY Platform, all the personal information regarding the supply points will be anonymised and secured and will be normalised into the Common Information Model (CIM) developed during the SYNERGY Project.

Cuerva is one of the leading business companies in the province of Granada. Its business areas comprise all electricity sector activities, namely electric power generation, distribution, and commercialization. The company also has in-depth knowledge of and wide experience in the operation and maintenance of electrical installations.

Thanks to its ongoing commitment to efficient working practices ever since it first began operating 80 years ago, the company has consolidated its position and has become one of the leading companies in the energy sector with an extremely successful reputation.

Open Call coming soon!

The SYNERGY project will launch an Open Call soon for cascade funding across different projects that make use of the SYNERGY Big Data Platform and Analytics Marketplace and are deployed in the SYNERGY demonstration sites. The aim is to enlarge the outreach of the core big data platform and analytics offering to be delivered by the SYNERGY consortium and engage relevant organizations in the development of innovative and added-value energy services that will complement those that will be offered as part of the SYNERGY implementation.

Stay tuned for more !

SYNERGY’s Asset Management Tool Suite

by Angelina Syrri [ICCS]

SYNERGY aims to deliver an Asset Management Tool Suite, consisting of four applications, which targets network and RES plant Operators. All four applications develop advanced grid-level analytics for optimized network and asset management services.

The prototype version of the applications will be released shortly and is well documented in the public deliverable D5.2 which reports all the implemented functionalities. On that account, the Tool Suite is designed to exploit the SYNERGY Big Data Platform and AI marketplace to obtain various smart meter data, SCADA data, portfolio analytics and fault statistics.

The Asset Management Tool Suite will be progressively updated, enhanced and validated during the demonstration phase of the project, where SYNERGY collaborating network and RES operators will be providing data, network information and feedback to support the development but also gain insights from the applications.

Any DSO, TSO or RES plant Operator who is interested in using such applications in the future, would have to register as a user in the SYNERGY platform and make accessible relevant datasets.

A glimpse of the application’s capabilities is provided below:

Infrastructure Sizing and Grid Planning application implements different features that target the operation and planning responsible operators of DSOs and TSOs, with the objective of providing valuable insights in terms of capacity and sizing requirements of network assets. The application utilizes available historical data and statistics such as expected next year forecasts of peak demand/generation data to create stochastic scenarios of demand and generation and perform power flow calculations to provide suggestions for optimal sizing and planning.

Flexibility based Network Management and DSO-TSO Common Operational Scheduling application implements all necessary features to allow network operators to operate their networks and schedule the available resources including flexible demand for the intra-day and day ahead in a coordinated manner. By exploiting all available data, including the flexibility potential of aggregators’ portfolios, the application facilitates the optimal scheduling of the flexible assets by TSOs and DSOs who aim to request specific congestion management and balancing services.

Advanced Performance Monitoring/Forecasting and Predictive Maintenance application targets the management of RES plants by ensuring their optimal operation, predictive maintenance and proactive avoidance of equipment faults. The tool steps on the forecasting and predictive analytics baseline algorithms and appropriate machine learning techniques towards identifying in real-time predictive maintenance needs, increasing PV technology reliability and efficiency and improving power trading functions on the plant operator side.

Asset Management Optimization for Power Grids application implements different features that target the maintenance responsible operators of DSOs and TSOs, with the objective of providing different models that optimize the maintenance management by enriching the available data with the results of a number of analytics and forecasts.

SYNERGY for a DSO – HEDNO’s story

by HEDNO

Big data and their exploitation in the energy sector are expected to bring a new era contributing to radical changes over Network Operation. The development of appropriate tools for the exploitation of data, collected from various sources including OT and IT systems, along with strong analytics and new algorithms, are expected to support DSO operation, bringing new capabilities and potential new business opportunities. The SYNERGY project offers an excellent environment for the development, testing, validation of innovative solutions, combining tool development and demonstration.

To achieve this goal, HEDNO as a demonstration leader supports and coordinates all project demo activities in close collaboration with all project partners. HEDNO is involved in the integration of distribution network operations and relevant IT systems in preparation for the pilot’s implementation across Greece.

In more detail, HEDNO will evaluate the provided technical solutions and will provide data and expertise for the use cases about integration and interoperability, with legacy DSO systems and data. The aim is to further examine the possible exploitation of the developed platform, under certain use cases scenarios related to DSO operation in the energy market. Especially in the Greek demo activities, HEDNO, in close cooperation with the other demo end users, IPTO, ELIN-VERD and EPA, that cover all the stakeholders in the energy value chain of the Greek energy market, examines demo cases covering all major business and operational activities such as:

Innovative Flexibility-based Network Management,
Common Operation Scheduling between TSO-DSO for advanced operation and flexibility exploitation,
new Asset Management and Planning approaches in order to improve network operation, Resilience and Power Quality,
Portfolio Analytics for energy services providers and retailers,
Flexibility segmentation, classification and clustering towards VPP configuration for demand response and
Local Flexibility Sharing for Self-Consumption Optimization at Local Community Level.

In collaboration with IPTO and ICCS, HEDNO has already contributed significantly to the development of flexibility exploitation mechanisms, introducing an operational processes map for TSO-DSO coordination. Furthermore, significant input related to end-users has been provided to the tool developers for building tools related to the realization and execution of the demo cases where HEDNO participates, and mostly related to asset management. For the latter, HEDNO has many expectations, since it will combine various data sources such as fault databases, inspection reports, active data collection sources such as thermal camera imaging and historical inspection, and maintenance records. HEDNO has already provided test data for all the above-mentioned data categories, in order to be fed in the data platform and support the development of analytics for predictive maintenance and reliability increase. In addition, for the scope of the project demo execution, HEDNO has selected an area of interest in the Attica region, providing sample data for network topology, equipment and related assets deployed in the field. HEDNO is planning to provide additional data from its smart metering infrastructure and support the operation of all the applications.

To summarize, the extension of the operational deployment of innovative applications that support big data exploitation within the SYNERGY project is expected to add significant value to network operations and strengthen stakeholder cooperation, resulting in increased efficiency, increased innovation, and increased excellence in the energy sector.