Best Paths: Upgrading Europe’s grid to new high-capacity technologies

Sixty people filled a room at the Amano Grand Central Hotel in Berlin on Wednesday 26 October 2016 for the second BEST PATHS dissemination workshop. The project was roughly halfway through its four years, and the day was built around its mid-term status: what each demonstration had achieved so far, and what industry, policy and renewables-sector guests made of it.

The presentations

Vicente Gonzalez Lopez of Red Eléctrica de España, the project coordinator, opened with an overview. Each demonstration then had its own slot: Luis Martin of Iberdrola on offshore wind links (Demo 1), Olivier Despouys of RTE on multivendor interoperability (Demo 2), Diego Cirio on upgrading multi-terminal HVDC (Demo 3), Vanessa Gombert of 50Hertz on repowering AC corridors (Demo 4) and Christian-Eric Bruzek of Nexans on superconducting DC links (Demo 5). Antonio Iliceto of Terna spoke on how the five fitted together, and Bo Normark presented the ISGAN Annex 6 programme.

Some of the results had hard numbers attached. The offshore wind team had a scaled laboratory set-up: a four-terminal DC grid with 60 kW MMC converter prototypes, plus a real-time digital simulator standing in for the AC grid. Terna and Nexans reported a prototype length of extruded (XLPE) HVDC submarine cable, intended for the Sardinia, Corsica and mainland Italy link, which had been tested for water penetration at 100 bar, the pressure found at about 1,000 metres depth; water travelled only 2.4 metres along the cable from the point of damage. Demo 2 had already issued its first interoperability recommendations for grid operators, vendors and standards bodies.

The panel

A debate closed the day with representatives of four other EU grid projects, e-Highway2050, MIGRATE, GARPUR and PROMOTioN, alongside a contribution from WindEurope. The theme was overlap: where the projects’ findings met, and where they could feed one another.

The next workshop was already fixed for Madrid in November 2017.

All five demonstrations presented in Berlin are laid out on the demonstrations overview, from the offshore wind laboratory to the superconducting cable, which the project went on to test as a 3.2 GW loop at 320 kV and 10 kA.