The transformation of Europe’s energy system creates both challenges and opportunities for the hydropower sector. Hydropower needs to seek out value within the electricity market aligned with other sources of renewable and sustainable energy, whilst operating and building plants in environmentally sensitive and acceptable ways. The call H2020 LC-SC3-CC-4-2018: “Support to sectorial fora”, item 2: “bringing together stakeholders of the hydropower sector in a forum” provides a unique opportunity to bring together the hydropower community and to develop a Research and Innovation Agenda, and a Technology Roadmap mapping implementation of that agenda. These will support implementation of research and innovation for new hydropower technologies and innovative mitigation measures. The HYDROPOWER-EUROPE project delivers these objectives through an extensive programme of stakeholder consultation. The consortium brings together six different associations and networks spanning the whole research and industry value chain. These networks, along with representatives of civil society and European and national authorities, will form the initial stakeholder consultation base. Through an extensive, cyclic programme of consultation – both online and through various regional, European and International workshops – research needs and priorities will be established supporting development of the Hydropower Research and Innovation Agenda. The consultation process also facilitates discussion around issues and perceptions affecting the implementation of hydropower in Europe. Conclusions from this will underpin development of the Technology Roadmap, addressing any issues affecting uptake of the research and innovation agenda. Finally, the HYDROPOWER-EUROPE project will also consider ways in which the forum, established through this initiative, may become sustainable beyond the 3-year project programme, so supporting uptake and implementation of the research and innovation agenda.

The ultimate objective of the XFLEX project is to increase hydropower potential in terms of plant efficiency, availability and provision of flexibility services to the Electric Power System (EPS). The high Renewable Energy Sources (RES) scenario of the decarbonisation process relies on a drastic change of the European Union EPS with a massive integration of non-dispatchable RES and disconnection of the so-called conventional units, as greenhouse gases emitters. These changes influence drastically the provision of the power grid balancing, and challenge the EPS operations and safety. It is of upmost importance to provide reliable solutions to support the EPS with more flexibility services. Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) already significantly supports EPS flexibility in terms of regulation capability, fast frequency control, fast start/stop, fast generating to pumping modes transition, high ramping rate, inertia emulation, fault ride through capacity, etc. XFLEX aims to demonstrate an innovative methodology for system integration of hydroelectric technology solutions, variable speed being a key component and a reference, to provide further enhanced flexibility services assessed by a crosscutting analysis of their impact on both the technology and the market aspects. Innovative solutions also target an optimize maintenance plan to decrease the outage time and increase the availability of the plant. Demonstrations are scheduled in the cases of run-of-river, storage and pumped storage HPPs and they cover cases of refurbished, uprated and especially existing HPP to be applied and scaled to any unit size. XFLEX draws the roadmap for the exploitation of its solutions to all the European HPP fleet. A strategic dissemination plan is set to promote the deployment of the demonstrated solutions to stakeholders, to the scientific community and the public and to further support the communication in workshops, conferences, scientific journals, newspapers and various social media.