OneNet

The European Commission funded project “OneNet” launched in October 2020 to tackle the challenges posed to transmission and distribution system operators and consumers in the European electricity market.

While the electrical grid is moving from being a fully centralized to a highly decentralized system, grid operators have to adapt to this changing environment and adjust their current business model to accommodate faster reactions and adaptive flexibility. This is an unprecedented challenge requiring an unprecedented solution. For this reason, the two major associations of grid operators in Europe, ENTSO-E and EDSO, have activated their members to put together a unique consortium.

Under the leadership of Fraunhofer FIT (coordinator Prof. Antonello Monti) and the Fraunhofer Center for Digital Energy, the project OneNet aims at developing and demonstrating the key instruments for a European approach to energy flexibility. Many projects addressed this issue in the past, but OneNet’s scope and size are unparalleled with a total budget of over 28 M€ (co-funding of the European Commission of about 22 M€).

The key elements of the project are the definition of a common market design for Europe, the definition of a common IT Architecture and IT Interfaces and large-scale demonstrators to implement and showcase the scalable solutions developed throughout the project. These demonstrators are organized in four clusters including countries in every region of Europe and testing innovative use cases never validated before.

OneNet is an open project; it will benefit from cascade funding from the European Commission, and from the addition of new members to the consortium in the coming three years. OneNet calls for the creation of a unified vision for Europe’s electricity market to which operators, consumers and stakeholders across Europe are urged to contribute. To this end, throughout the project duration and afterwards, the project will develop the open forum initiative “GRIFOn”, a platform to freely discuss results with all relevant stakeholders external to the project and collect their feedback.

The OneNet consortium has over 70 partners. Key partners in the consortium include: ENTSO-E and EDSO, Elering, EDP Distribution, RWTH Aachen University, University of Comillas, VITO, European Dynamics, Ubitech, Engineering and the EUI’s Florence School of Regulation (Energy).