PARITY Grant

HYPERTECH Energy Labs have been awarded a new R&D contract from the European Commission (Project Acronym: PARITY). PARITY addresses the “structural inertia” of DGs by delivering a transactive flexibility framework that will increase durability and efficiency of the electrical grid, while simultaneously enabling the adoption of more RES through enhanced realtime control of DER Flexibility combined with novel Active Network Management functionalities. PARITY will go beyond the traditional “top-down” grid management practices by delivering a unique local flexibility management platform through the seamless integration of IoT and Blockchain technologies. By delivering a smart-contract enabled market platform based on blockchain technology, PARITY will facilitate the efficient deployment of local micro-transactions and reward flexibility in a cost-reflective and symmetric manner, through price signals of higher spatio-temporal granularity based on real-time grid operational conditions. Finally, by deploying advanced IoT technology PARITY will offer distributed intelligence (DER profiling) and self-learning/ self-organization capabilities (automated real-time distributed control), orchestrated by cost reflective flexibility market signals generated by the blockchain LFM platform. Within PARITY, DER will form dynamic clusters that essentially comprise self-organized networks of active DER nodes, engaging in real-time aggregated & P2P energy/ flexibility transactions.

HYPERTECH Energy Labs holds the role of the technical manager of the project and will coordinate the technical activities to be realized by an international consortium of renowned academic and industrial partners, led by the CERTH-ITI (Greece) and actively involving CIRCE, Montajes Eléctricos Cuerva (CUERVA), URBENER and Universidad de la Iglesia de Deusto (Spain), University of Nicosia (Cyprus), BFS SA, Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator S.A. and QUE Technologies (Greece), MERIT Consulting House (Belgium), Checkwatt AB and Energilösningar Aktiebola (Sweden), Azienda Elettrica di Massagno (AEM), Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana and Hive Power Sagl (Switzerland), e7 Energie Markt Analyse GmbH (Austria).

HYPERTECH will also lead WP on DER flexibility management & storage-as-a-service and it will offer its office premises – fully-equipped with sensor/ metering/ actuation devices – for pre-validation of the PARITY Building-as-a-Battery solution.

PARITY is a project co-funded by the European Commission under the H2020 Programme/ Topic LC-SC3-ES-1-2019 Flexibility and retail market options for the distribution grid (IA). The project has officially been launched on October 1st 2019, its duration is 42 months and it has a total budget of €9.3M.

PARITY aims to enable the set-up and operation of local flexibility markets at the distribution network level via a holistic offering encompassing:

• A smart contract enabled, blockchain based local flexibility market platform (LFM) which will facilitate both peer-to-peer energy/flexibility transactions as well as the sell/purchase of flexibility to Smart Grid actors. Energy/flexibility credits will be used to stimulate liquidity in the local market and to provide the means for market coupling with national energy & ancillary service markets through a mechanism that will link these virtual credits to actual currency.
• IoT enabled DER Flexibility management tools - both in a peer-to-peer distributed fashion, but also through a centralised aggregator – that range from tools that uncover latent demand flexibility in building (e.g. P2H solutions) and flexibility from sources not yet fully exploited in the current market landscape (e.g. EVs) to tools for collecting, coordinating and controlling these distributed flexibility sources, in cases of failure of the local flexibility market.
• Smart Grid monitoring and management tools to enable the DSO to optimally manage the low voltage distribution network in the presence of increasing intermittent RES penetration and with the aim to contain the problems they create to grid stability. These tools will comprise both software tools for the real-time monitoring and control of the network assets as well as an innovative grid component (STATCOM) which can physically manage power flows on the grid and facilitate the containment of instability and its resolution via services for power quality restoration.