The main aim of the DRES2Market project is to develop a comprehensive and affordable approach to facilitate the effective participation of distributed generation based on renewable energies in the electricity markets, and enable to provide balancing and reserve services according to market criteria DRES2Market is focused on overcoming the existing barriers (technology and regulatory framework) for developing the integration of these technologies, based on the following issues: - The evaluation of the existing technologies (power generation, energy storage solutions, smart technologies, etc.) to design appropriate approaches for the effective integration of distributed generation in the electricity and ancillary services markets, propose the evolution of the technology to fulfil with the requirements to participate in these markets and recommend standards for these technologies. - The analysis of the existing grid codes and markets rules in the European markets to assess their capacity to enable the participation of variable renewable energy. - The identification of opportunities for the active participation of final consumers (based on distributed generation) in the penetration of these technologies, according to market criteria, proposing collaborative schemes. - The identification of arguments of the positive impact of these technologies, to obtain the social acceptance of these technologies. This initiative includes validation procedures based on computing and simulating processes based on real conditions. DRES2Market consortium includes the key players for the system integration of variable renewable energy: balance responsible parties; market operators, grid operator; providers of technology solutions; prosumers; retailers that can develop the aggregator role; renewable energy players; research and development (R&D) institutions and consultants with large expertise in renewable energy integration in electricity systems.

The aim of the PV-Prosumers4Grid project is to develop and implement innovative self-consumption and aggregation concepts and business models for PV prosumers that will help integrating sustainable and competitive electricity from PV in the electricity system. The benefits of the PV-Prosumers4Grid action will be therefore threefold: • To identify the necessary regulatory changes and the business opportunities for PV prosumers and grid operators • To further support the deployment PV systems for electricity generation with focus on physical and financial grid interactions • To provide PV Prosumers (households and industries) with competitive and sustainable electricity Innovative self-consumption and aggregation concepts and business models for PV generation are extremely needed nowadays. At the time being many EU Member States have drastically reduced measures to further support the development of the RES sector, even though several projects have clearly demonstrated the need to maintain the policies to support RES until when a consolidated competitiveness has been achieved. Such competetiveness for variable RES will depend on the ability of the existing or future electricity markets to provide them with adequate revenues, whatever the size of the plant. In addition, the variable aspect of PV doesn’t allow them by nature to bid on the market at chosen times, with a possible and already visible impact on the market prices. The consequence could be that under such conditions, their competitiveness will become more difficult to achieve unless the consumers could become more responsive to price signals and allow to displace the load. Moreover, the new state aid guidelines published in April 2014 by the European Commission are pushing for further integration of renewable sources into the electricity markets, which will require from RES to cope with market integration, more constraining grid codes and balancing regulations.

MetaFacturing focuses on a digitized toolchain for metal part production which will lead to a more resilient production process with respect to the raw materials used (e.g., recycled materials), reduces operator effort and cost, and reduces scrap due to out-of-specification parts. The vision is to create a widely-applicable Digital Twin based process setup and control framework, fulfilling the requirements of industrial scale parts manufacturers (with a specific focus on metal parts) whose central hurdle is the effective use of available part and process data to improve the time-to-market and product quality. This framework will strongly leverage on a range of state-of-the-art technologies in the field of model-based data fusion, efficient process simulation, and data standardisation, and continuous Life Cycle Assessment in order to efficiently develop solutions which are tailored for deployment in industry. MetaFacturing project brings together 6 market leaders (FRONIUS, NEMAK, FILL, VITRONIC, BENTELER and LTH) which will closely cooperate in order to reach a new level of leadership in sustainable manufacturing while maintaining their respective market dominance. The envisaged approach will exploit all available data in the process, starting from material data, in-process measurements, end-of-line quality control and sampling-based product validation. The Digital Twin based approach will enable the holistic consideration of this data in order to provide automatic feedback for the process control, as well as providing novel (meta-)data on the materials used which will be valuable to train the engineers working with these materials.

Reliable and efficient electricity supply to geographically distributed customers is the main task of the Distribution System Operators (DSOs). An increasing number of grid-related data sources is in principle accessible to DSOs, but this information is in most cases not yet utilized for grid operation. Leveraging measurements and ICT reachability of Smart Meters and grid connected systems (such as Intelligent Electronic Devices) for digital distribution grid operation is challenging as it requires resilient and secure data collection, and data-quality aware processing and distribution system control solutions. The Net2DG project will develop a proof-of-concept solution based on off-the-shelf computing hardware that uses existing communication technologies to leverage measurement capabilities of Smart Meters and DER inverters deployed in low-voltage (LV) grids. The solution will correlate this data with information from existing DSO subsystems in order to provide novel LV grid observability applications for voltage quality, grid operation efficiency and LV grid outage diagnosis. The resulting observability is subsequently used by specifically developed robust control and coordination approaches, which utilize existing actuation capabilities for voltage quality enhancement and loss minimization in the LV grid. The use of off-the shelf components, the system level resilience and security solution, and the offered customizability of the Net2DG approach specifically address the needs of small and medium-sized DSOs (less than 100.000 clients). Therefore, the Net2DG solution will make small and medium-sized DSOs early adopters of digital technologies for LV outage diagnosis, grid operation efficiency and voltage quality. The Net2DG solutions will be developed by a consortium including two small and medium-sized DSOs from two different European countries, academic partners, SME and startup technology companies, as well as Smart Meter and inverter vendors.