Seventy residential and business customers from Alcochete, Mafra, Évora and Caldas da Rainha will participate in the European project EUniversal, coordinated by E-REDES.
With an overall budget of 9.8 million euros, EUniversal is developing and implementing an innovative concept of a universal interface (that can be used by all stakeholders, anywhere) and that ensures interoperability between the operational needs of the electricity system and the existing offers in the flexibility market.
This concept called UMEI (Universal Market Enabling Interface) represents an innovative, adaptable, modular and evolutionary approach, which will be the basis for the development of new business perspectives, market solutions and, above all, intends to guarantee the mechanisms for an active participation of the Consumers, who are at the centre of these research projects.
The expectation is that this interface will be the first step towards the definition of solutions that can be scaled throughout Europe and that can promote the transformation of the electrical grid, helping to overcome some limitations and preparing it to accommodate various future scenarios arising from the electrification of society.
The project, which has the participation of 19 European partners of eight nationalities, including distribution network operators from Portugal, Germany and Poland, academia, research and consulting centers, market platforms, and aggregators, among others, was launched in 2020 and is expected to last 42 months.
EUniversal intends to validate and test the solutions in three European pilots located in Portugal, Germany and Poland. In the particular case of the Portuguese pilot, the chosen locations complement each other and jointly contribute to the project's objectives, not only in the scope of the tools and services to be tested, such as smart grid functionalities, congestion management, resilience, demand side response, flexibility mapping, among others, but also in providing an effective means to demonstrate the universality of the UMEI concept through the actual interconnection of the E-REDES smart grid to two distinct market flexibility operation platforms, as well as to third party solutions for the provision of flexibility services.
The energy transition relies heavily on the local dimension, with municipalities and communities playing a major role in it.
E-REDES was, in 2020, in the private sector, the Portuguese company with the largest Horizon 2020 budget for Innovation and Research (R&I) projects, with about 7.9 million euros, and currently has 8 participations running simultaneously.
The EUniversal project is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under agreement number 864334.