News and events from the BEST PATHS project, 2014 to its close in 2018

Almost two years of contract negotiation with the European Commission came before BEST PATHS started work at the end of 2014. From then until September 2018 its consortium kept a running record of the project: news items, press releases and an events calendar that at its fullest ran to fourteen pages.

The events fall into three groups. The project held its own dissemination workshops, the second in Berlin in October 2016 and the third in Madrid in November 2017, each giving a progress report on all five demonstrations. In 2017 and 2018 came one special workshop per demonstration, in Trondheim, Budapest, Codrongianos, Paris and La Spezia, usually at the laboratory or substation where the work had been done. The series ended with a final conference in Brussels on 20 September 2018. The third group is outside conferences, such as ISH 2015 in Pilsen or IEEE PowerTech 2017 in Manchester, where partners presented papers.

The news items go wider. Alongside results from the project, they covered undersea HVDC cables, superconducting links, battery storage and the plan to synchronise the Baltic grids with continental Europe by 2025.

The record, year by year

The first entries date from late 2015. A press release in November of that year set out the project’s case, and the presentations and report from the first dissemination workshop went online the same month. In August 2015 partners had already been in Pilsen for the High Voltage Engineering symposium, presenting two papers on insulated cross-arms for overhead lines.

2016 was quieter on the page and busier in the laboratories. The one large public event was the Berlin workshop of 26 October, where the five demonstrations reported mid-term results and four sister EU projects sat on a shared panel.

2017 brought the most news. A set of short videos explained the five demonstrations. In May a real-time simulator for connecting large offshore wind farms was unveiled in Trondheim. Features followed on undersea HVDC cables, supergrids and the question of whether Europe could go dark, and the project travelled to conferences in Cardiff and China. The year closed with the Madrid workshop of 22 November, hosted by Red Eléctrica de España and Iberdrola.

2018 was the year of results. The special workshops came one a month through the spring and early summer: Budapest on 5 April, where new line hardware was shown under voltage, Codrongianos on 9 May, Paris on 5 June and La Spezia on 5 July, where the superconducting cable system was presented. News items between them covered cable losses on offshore wind farms, battery storage in smart grids and, in July, the plan to synchronise the Baltic states with continental Europe. The closing conference in Brussels on 20 September brought in ACER for a policy panel, and a final news item that week called for further action on Europe’s grid.

The record a research project leaves behind is uneven by nature. Some entries are short notices that a report or a set of slides had gone online; others are long features with interviews and figures. The short ones still fill in the timeline, and most point on to the demonstration or guide that covers the subject in depth.

One entry stands apart from the dated news: an interview with Vicente González López, head of R&D at Red Eléctrica de España, on what it takes to move renewable power across Europe at scale.

If you read only one entry, make it the Paris workshop of June 2018: the first systematic test of HVDC converters from different vendors working on one DC grid.

Dates on this page are the ones the project gave at the time. A few items carried no date when they were published; they are listed where they fall in the story, without one.