No time to lose: Equipping the future electricity grid
Energy experts came together in Brussels at the final conference of the EU project Best Paths to discuss with policymakers how to upgrade and improve the European electricity grid. The conference, which was organised by Greenovate! Europe, brought together around 120 experts from all over the continent. “The technologies developed in Best Paths will have a significant role in the evolution of the transmission grid, ensuring the grid is ready to cover the market actors’ requirements in the new energy paradigm at an affordable cost. Investment today in the future grid is mandatory to accelerate the transition process. All relevant actors: policy makers, regulatory authorities, transmission system operators and utilities, manufacturers, researchers and citizens should understand that there is no time to lose if Europe wants to continue leading the transition process worldwide,” says project coordinator Vicente González López from Red Eléctrica de España. Best Paths is the largest research project in the energy field financed by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration (FP7) for research and technological development. The project ends in September 2018 after four years, having united 38 partners around five large-scale demonstrations to validate the technical feasibility, costs, impacts and benefits of the tested grid technologies. The focus of the demonstrations is to deliver solutions for the transition from High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) lines to HVDC grids, upgrading and repowering existing Alternating Current (AC) parts of the network, and to integrate superconducting high power DC links within an AC meshed network. Three parallel workshops showed the latest breakthroughs in transmission technologies from the project. Read more: http://www.bestpaths-project.eu
Countries
Belgium, Spain, France