RTE international is mobilised within the R2D2 project to secure the European electricity grid
On 1st October 2022, the new project funded by the Horizon Europe Programme was launched.
R2D2 is a project that concern Reliability, Resilience and Defense technology for the grid in Europe. As part of a consortium of 17 partners in 9 countries throughout Europe working on the project, RTE international, as a work package leader, will ensure that the project is moving forward and that the contributors are making progress on the different tasks.
R2D2 aims at improving the reliability and the resilience of current Electrical Power and Energy Systems (EPES).
Indeed, the number of threats and vulnerabilities in the grid are growing which can affect critical infrastructure and expose weaknesses with harmful and damaging effects on different stakeholders and final customers.
This improvement will be done through the deployment of four tools dedicated to the prevention, protection, and restoration of EPES in different independent but complementary scenarios covering the entire energy value-chain – from regional coordination between TSOs, to end users of the network. The project will complement strong energy coordination actions in South-East Europe (SEE). It will follow EU legislation and be aligned with recent activities promoted by ENTSO-E related to cyber-security in transmission systems.
Through the demonstration and integration of the innovative solutions proposed by R2D2, it will be possible to achieve a more secure, reliable, and resilient energy system in Europe, making a positive and tangible impact throughout the European EPES value chain.
In this context, R2D2 will deliver a palette of complementary solutions synthesised into four Products: “Multi-risk assessment framework for power system”, “Resilience suite for TSO & DSO”(where RTE international will act as the Work Package Leader), “Prevention Systems For Energy Infrastructures Security” and “Enhanced Assets Maintenance And Management Toolkit”.
R2D2 results will be tested and validated in 4 large-scale complementary demonstrators. In Greece, Serbia, Spain, and Slovenia involving representative and complete value chains. This permit to have a wide variety of energy sources, networks, systems, and assets, and spanning heterogeneous climatic, geographic, and socioeconomic conditions which will facilitate replicability, scale-up and eventual market launch.
Thanks to a smart, efficient end-to-end monitoring and control of power networks as the R2D2 tools do, EPES benefit from an overall system costs reduction coming from reduced system power losses (technical and nontechnical), lower number and duration of outages or lower investment in disaster recovery.
RTE international is a consultancy and engineering company whose activities cover all areas of electricity transmission. RTE international is at the service of its clients worldwide, helping them to develop reliable and competitive power systems which rise to the challenges of the energy transition.
As a subsidiary of RTE, Europe’s largest transmission system operator, RTE international offers tailored solutions to participants in the electricity sector, relating to the development, operation, and maintenance of their networks.
Since its creation in 2006, RTE international’s experts have carried out more than 300 projects in over 50 countries across all continents, building on the know-how and skills developed through RTE’s 70 years of successful operation. RTE international employs more than 70 members of staff and more than 100 experts each year.
ETRA Investigation y Desarrollo, S.A. (ETRA I+D) is the hi-tech unit within ETRA Group, one of the leading industrial groups in Spain. ETRA’s mission is putting technology to work for serving society in the fields of energy efficiency, mobility, security and communications. ETRA has a branch in Bulgaria, although it operates worldwide. ETRA leads the 17 partners’ consortium developing R2D2 project.
ETRA will contribute to improving the resilience and reliability of the power grid electricity grid, as well as reducing the number of failures and extending the useful life of the components. To do this, thanks to autonomous drones and artificial intelligence, it will develop new solutions that integrate automation and robotics in predictive maintenance and the optimal management of assets in electricity transmission and distribution networks.