National Grid has invited industry and academia to develop projects that address its innovation priorities across the GB gas and electricity systems and promised funding of up to £1 million for the most important projects. An application window is open between now and 28 February.
The System Operator set out 16 innovation priorities in a new Innovation Strategy:
- Developing Distribution System Operators (DSOs) and whole-system operability
- Improving short-term forecasting of generation/supply and demand
- Managing volatility in a low-inertia system
- Leveraging analytics in a data-enabled future
- Delivering enhanced cyber security
- Enabling more non-synchronous connections
- Supporting voltage and reactive power
- Optimising constraint management
- Redesigning system restoration
- Creating markets for the future
- Harnessing a digitised grid
- Understanding long-term behavioural change in consumption and generation
- Enabling changing gas flows
- Enhancing visibility of Distributed Energy Resources
- Embracing gas specification diversity
Some are already being investigated via Network Innovation Competition projects. Now the SO wants organisations to bring forward early-stage ideas for projects that can help deliver innovation in all these areas.
The application window will be open in the period 8-28 February and successful applications will be notified on 9 March.
An Open Innovation Day on 28 March will cover five of the topics:
- Developing DSOs & whole system operability
- Enhancing visibility of Distributed Energy Resources
- Unlocking flexibility
- Embracing gas specification diversity
- Enabling more non-synchronous connections
More information at the SO’s innovation website