On 29 October 2020, the ERIGrid project was announced the winner of the “Good Practice of the Year” award in the category “Technological Innovation & System Integration”. AIT Austrian Institute of Technology Senior Scientist Thomas Strasser and coordinator of ERIGrid and ERIGrid 2.0 accepted the prize at the award ceremony within the 6th Energy Infrastructure Forum, organised by the European Commission’s DG Energy.
Awarded by the Renewables Grid Initiative, the prize recognises exceptional and innovative practices that improve the current state of affairs for the integration of renewables. In this year’s competition the jury acknowledged the impact of ERIGrid’s Holistic Approach for Evaluating Complex Smart Grid Systems and the integration of results in multiple laboratories, including 73 user projects and 175 users of the lab access programme.
Before ERIGrid, various research initiatives have mainly focused on validating certain aspects of smart grids, but there was no integrated approach for analysing and evaluating complex configurations in a cyber-physical systems manner. Therefore, with smart grid solutions being one of the most important factors in the system transformation, ERIGrid’s work in systematic smart grid testing and the resulting holistic approach are worthy of broad recognition.
Furthermore, being a research infrastructure project with strong practical focus, ERIGrid was able to promptly implement results in practice and support new smart grid solutions of the lab access user projects (read their success stories here). This experience shows the importance of supporting networking and development of smart grid infrastructures for rapid rollout of results and new solutions in smart energy, as demonstrated by ERIGrid.
“Research Infrastructures – like ERIGrid and ERIGrid 2.0 in the domain of power and energy systems – are an important backbone for the European Research Area. ERIGrid has supported a lot of external user groups, especially also from industry/SMEs, in their experimental research, developments, and validation leading to new developments and innovations for a sustainable energy supply and infrastructure of the future. Therefore, it is an honour for us to be awarded with the ‘Good Practice of the Year’ award.
I would like to thank all project partners for this great success and excellent work during the last couple of years. Special thanks goes also to our stakeholders/lab access user group members, our advisory board members, the European Commission for funding this action and for sure also to the jury and the Renewables Grid Initiative.”
Coordinator of ERIGrid and ERIGrid 2.0