The BRIDGE initiative of the European Commission represents a vibrant community of projects funded by Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes. Established in 2016, BRIDGE brings together projects that are active in the areas of smart grids, energy storage, islands, and digitalisation. BRIDGE fosters continuous knowledge sharing amongst projects and baselining of their activities and results and facilitates the uptake of innovative technologies in the energy sector. It also mobilises the projects to synthesise and deliver joint conclusions and recommendations on exploiting the key project results and experiences for advancing the delivery of the Green Deal and REPowerEU objectives. BRIDGE published its 2023 brochure and four reports of the working groups Data Management and Regulation.
The OMEGA-X project participates in the four different BRIDGE working groups: Data management, Regulation, Consumer and citizen engagement and Business models.
The new brochure of BRIDGE provides an overview of the participating projects, the implementing partners, demonstrators, innovative technologies and key exploitable results, as well as the geographical coverage. The brochure contains a two-page fact sheet on the project, detailing all the information necessary to explore the context, scope, impact of all the projects developed, the consortium partners, the geographical coverage of the projects and the funding obtained.
The brochure can be downloaded here.
DATA MANAGEMENT
The Data Management Working Group of BRIDGE aims to cover a wide range of aspects ranging from the technical means for exchanging and processing data between interested stakeholders to the definition of rules for exchange, including security issues and responsibility distribution in data handling.
This working group published recently three reports including findings and recommendations:
This report aims at contributing to the discussion and practical steps towards truly interoperable and business process agnostic data exchange arrangements on European scale both inside the energy domain and across different domains.
Used as a common denominator between all the projects, the Reference Framework’s objective was to define some generic business processes, which are agnostic to any specific technical solution, enabling to map each of the projects’ specific solutions to these Generic Business Processes to enable cross-projects comparison and analysis.
This report defines some common ground on the interoperability of home appliances and provides insights in the approaches used by the BRIDGE projects, problems they face in that respect and solutions defined to simplify the task of approaching different (home) appliances.
REGULATIONS
The BRIDGE Regulatory working group defines the most important regulatory challenges to be addressed, propose best practices from the BRIDGE projects and formulate recommendations for policy makers. The work of the BRIDGE regulatory working group is focused on 4 main objectives, translated into 4 actions:
- Action 1: Improve market access for consumers to value their flexibility
- Action 2: Examine options for service provision by energy communities
- Action 3: Facilitate flexibility market coordination and integration
- Action 4: Support the potential synergies coming from increased sector coupling/sector integration/system integration.
Read more on the barriers, best practices and recommendations in their annual report here.
More about BRIDGE
BRIDGE is a European Commission initiative involving 155 projects in total in the fields of Smart Grid, Energy Storage, Islands, and Digitalisation, of which 97 are ongoing and 58 completed, involving 1510 organisations from 39 countries with a cumulative total funding of €1303 million under the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes over the last eight years (2015-2023).
This initiative has an average growth rate of 45% every two years. And in total, from the start of the 2016-2017 period until 2022-2023, it has grown by 546%. BRIDGE aims to create a structured overview of the cross-cutting issues found in demonstration projects that can be a barrier to innovation. The initiative encourages continuous knowledge sharing between projects, enabling them to formulate conclusions and recommendations on the future exploitation of project results with one voice.