EU Energy Projects Podcast: How ETIP SNET is supporting the energy transition

The smart networks for energy transition (SNET) platform is one of several platforms set up by the European Commission to guide research, development and innovation in specified areas, in this case to support the energy transition.

In the 10 years since its establishment, the platform has played an important role – and increasingly is being sought upon by the Commission – for advice in advance of the development of a new policy or guideline.

But perhaps unknown is that all the work of the platform, primarily through its five working groups in key areas of interest, is provided freely.

“It’s a community of good people … very committed to work hard,” says Cunha – and when called on, “it's good because it gives us an upfront position to make some kind of advocacy of what are the needs of the system for the next period of time.”

Cunha, whose term as chair and on the executive committee has since ended (at the time of writing) but counts years of association in the past, says that perennial topics of importance include renewables integration, network management and consumer participation with flexibility, with the focus on long, medium and short term perspectives.

He highlights one finding that has emerged from the 10-year plan is that the ‘technological readiness level’ indicator, widely used to indicate implementation readiness for a technology, is insufficient, as it doesn’t measure the market or business readiness, or the sovereignty in Europe, of the technology.

“We need a compound of different indicators to understand the most appropriate level of technology that is available and can be implemented for each use case,” he says.

“Just because a technology is at TRL9 doesn’t mean the market is ready to adopt it and that’s crucial for Europe because of the money and effort put into the Horizon project calls and the lost value when translated into benefits for customers.”

One of the key pieces of work during Cunha’s term as chair of ETIP SNET, and which he led, was the development of a position paper on AI in smart grids, drawing on extensive sector input and discussion over several months. This paper forms part of key input into the European Commission’s AI and digitalisation roadmap.

“It’s a very interesting paper, because for the first time in a single place we take AI from policy to regulation to technology to use cases and then to a roadmap for the short, medium and long terms.”

‘Long’ in this context is three to five years, he adds, given the pace of AI’s development, compared with other technologies.

Looking ahead, Cunha says that ETIP SNET has a clear mandate to define research and innovation priorities, but it has the potential to deliver more value.

Comparing ETIP SNET to a professional football team who play and have beers together and work to a tight schedule, he says: the framework in place doesn’t allow the kind of professionalism that he would see as mandatory to extract more value from ETIP SNET.

“The capabilities are there, and the framework is there, but we need to become professionals.”

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