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.