BRIDGE is a cooperation group involving 36 Low Carbon Energy (LCE) Smart-Grid and Energy Storage projects and it is funded under the Horizon 2020 program over the last four years (2014-2017). This cooperation aims to foster the exchange of information, experience, knowledge and best practices among its members. One of the goals of BRIDGE is to provide field experience, feedback and lessons learned based on the participating projects in order to help overcome the barriers that hinders effective innovation.

Besides, another aim of this cooperation is to gather recommendations which are well coordinated and balanced as well as coherent in order to strengthen the messages and to make sure that the impact they make is maximized effectively maximize towards policy makers which would in turn affect or influence the removing of barriers to innovation deployment.

In addition to this, our audience are already familiar with GOFLEX, which was a part of H2020 which was called Demonstration of smart grid, storage and system integration technologies with increasing share of renewables, distribution system. Meanwhile, IBM IRELAND LIMITED (IRELAND) coordinated the GOFLEX project and what it does is that it innovates, integrates, and demonstrates a group of electricity smart-grid technologies which is used to manage flexibility in energy production and consumption. More importantly, it may interest you to know that the full meaning of GOFLEX actually is; Generalized Operational FLEXibility for Integrating Renewables in the Distribution Grid.

Nevertheless, the total amount of money that has been sort in cost over this project between 2016 and 2019 is 11.2M€ and the EU contributed 6.8M€. The services and technology that was used during the project includes:

–     Technologies for consumers: Demand response

–     Grid technologies.

–     Network management, monitoring and control tools

–     Distributed storage technologies: Batteries, Electric Vehicles, Thermal Energy Storage.

–     Market: Ancillary services

The project builds upon existing technology (TRL5-7) from several areas:

–     Demand-response schemas and infrastructures

–     Energy storage systems

–     Energy management systems

–     Electrification of transport

–     Distribution grid monitoring and management

–     Energy data management infrastructures

The project is expected to give an outcome which would be an increase to technology readiness level of seven or eight. The project takes a phased approach over its three-year implementation period.   An initial requirements analysis by the sixth month allows completion of the first prototypes by the end of the first year. The second year sees these prototypes integrated tested under simulated and real-world conditions. In the third year, fully integrated systems are demonstrated and evaluated.