This R&D roadmap defines eight strategic pillars to transform power grids in response to the challenges of decarbonization, digital transition, and resilience. It aims to unite industry stakeholders around a shared vision to optimize investment, technological innovation, and the system’s environmental footprint.
Electrical systems and grids play a fundamental role in achieving the European Union’s decarbonization goals and are undergoing deep and rapid transformations. These changes affect production methods, electricity usage, and grid component technologies, as well as regulations, business models, and societal expectations. Furthermore, numerous innovations in the fields of digital technology and data are amplifying these developments. By integrating all these elements, the R&D roadmap is structured around eight key pillars:
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Optimal Energy Transition: This involves developing new load profile forecasting methods that account for new usages and distributed intelligence; quantifying various flexibility needs; transforming grid development, management, and operation methods to integrate flexibilities; developing solutions to limit overproduction occurrences; and adapting market design and regulation.
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Competitiveness and Efficiency: The goal is to optimize investments and asset management, improve grid steering—notably through decentralized intelligence and virtualization—enhance customer relations, and enable new services by leveraging big data, AI, and Gen-AI.
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System Resilience: Innovative solutions are required to address the increasing complexity of the system, manage risks related to cyberattacks, forecast the effects of extreme weather events, and adapt the grid and its components to these new constraints.
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Environmental Footprint: R&D efforts are essential to limit the carbon footprint, minimize material consumption, integrate biodiversity, and limit soil artificialization. They must enable the development of actionable and relevant environmental indicators.
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Innovative Components: The aim is to leverage progress in power electronics, design the new components required by the evolving electrical system (including components for DC grids), and integrate the opportunities offered by superconductivity.
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Digital Opportunities: This involves developing innovative solutions to process massive amounts of data, guarantee data quality, manage data access, protect privacy, and ensure sovereignty. It also includes managing cyberattack risks, developing interoperability, and leveraging telecom innovations for power grid management.
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Users, Territories, and Governance: The objective is to contribute to the definition and implementation of national and local public policies, facilitate energy-saving actions (sobriety), integrate socio-technical feasibility into the construction of new grid infrastructure, support consumers in becoming active participants in system changes, and contribute to the design of efficient, fair, and incentive-based market designs and grid tariffs.
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Innovative Solutions for Developing, Reconstructing, and Isolated Areas (ZNI): R&D must enable the integration of renewable energies at unprecedented levels, ensure the maintenance of system frequency and voltage in contexts of limited diversity, adapt grid protection systems for weakly meshed territories, plan the evolution of low-cost decarbonized micro-grids in contexts of incremental usage and production additions, and design durable micro-grid components and infrastructure for areas where repairability is difficult.
This roadmap is intended to allow various stakeholders in the sector—industrial players, research centers, and funding bodies—to share a common vision of perspectives and priorities. It aims to foster cooperation and optimize the allocation of available resources.
