INESC TEC participates in a European project for a greater integration of renewable energies

INESC TEC is part of a European project that gathers 12 institutions from six countries, aiming at developing technologies capable of improving the performance of forecasting systems for the production of renewable energy by at least 15%, and thus contributing to an increase of the integration of production of these energy sources.

The technologies, which will be developed under the European project Smart4RES (Next Generation Modelling and Forecasting of Variable Renewable Generation for Large-scale Integration in Energy Systems and Markets), include models for weather forecasting; models for automatic learning to predict renewable power by combining different sources of information, including meteorology, satellites, among others; forecasting models and artificial intelligence tools for decision support based on data for storage optimisation, power grid management and participation in the electricity market.

Besides INESC TEC, there is another Portuguese institution, EDP CNET (Centre for New Energy Technologies), participating in this project funded by the European Commission with EUR 4 million.

“The Smart4RES project will produce a set of innovations in the area of energy integration from renewable sources. The main goal of the project is to develop new algorithms and business models for the forecasting of renewable-based production and integration in several decision support processes, namely in terms of the power grid management, participation in the electricity market or optimisation of storage systems. As an R&D institution, we will mainly contribute to the development of power forecasting and decision support technologies“, explains Ricardo Bessa, assistant coordinator of the INESC TEC’s Centre for Power and Energy Systems.

The developed technologies will be tested in seven European countries – Portugal, Greece, Romania, France, Germany and the Netherlands – and then they will be commercially exploited by the industrial partners of the project, with businesses in the sale of forecasting services, as is the case of the German company EMSYS, the French company Météo-France, the Norwegian company DNV GL and the Dutch company Whiffle.

Coordinated by the French R&D institute ARMINES, this project includes two Portuguese partners – INESC TEC and EDP CNET -, plus two French institutions besides the coordinator – DOWEL and Méteo-France -, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), two German institutions – Energy & Meteo Systems and DLR -, two Greek – Institute of Communication and Computer Systems and Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator – and two Dutch institutions – DNVGL and Whiffle.

This project was funded by the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No. 864337.

The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC.