Presenting the partners: ETRA

ETRA Investigación y Desarrollo, S.A. (ETRA I+D) is the hi-tech unit within ETRA Group, one of the leading industrial groups in Spain.

ETRA’s mission is putting in the market the most advanced solutions and services either directly or through the 10 companies of the Group, says Aurelio Lazaro, Project Manager at ETRA.

The main market areas of the ETRA Group are Spain, Portugal, Eastern Europe, LATAM, Northern Africa and the Middle East. The activity of the company started in the 1970’s and is centered in three main activity lines; energy management (with more than 50 major public and private large clients using ETRA’s systems), smart mobility (including EV charging infrastructure management) and cyber physical security.

Enhanced software

ETRA has developed specific software to monitor and control advanced microgrids allowing the different stakeholders of such structure to operate in an optimized fashion. With the work developed in FLEXGRID, this software will be enhanced with the intelligence needed to take advantage of the recent and vast advances in Optimal Power Flow (OPF) theory and market clearing algorithms, explains Lazaro.

In addition, he emphasizes, the FLEXGRID project will highly enhance demand response through the design of pricing schemes that:

1. automate and enable stacked revenue model, and
2. exploit recent advances in mechanism design.

FLEXGRID also focuses on the development of more complex and efficient business models and energy markets.

Role and objectives in FLEXGRID

The FLEXGRID platform developed in the project and its respective modules will enable ETRA to reinforce its position as service provider for public authorities.

ETRA’s core market in the energy sector will be increased to different electric DSOs that could consider their coupling to adjacent gas grids to coupled energy flows and increase the system efficiency. Moreover, thanks to the involvement of ETRA in this project, the position of the company in South-Eastern Europe will be reinforced, notes Lazaro.

As Work Package 6 leader in the project, ETRA will exploit FLEXGRID’s research outcome in order to integrate selected mathematical models and intelligent research algorithms from FLEXGRID into a short-list of Horizon 2020 WISEGRID and CROSSBOW tools. According to these large-scale EU flagship projects’ business planning, a number of tools and products will be released into the market by 2022-2023 (2 years after the projects’ completion).

The ultimate goal of ETRA is to exploit its high community building capacity and experience to promote these EU projects’ products for real market uptake in the EU area in the long term, says Lazaro.

Tools and products to market

After the project’s lifetime, the major exploitation targets of ETRA will be to place the tools and products developed within the FLEXGRID project into the market.

ETRA’s main market would be small DSOs, understanding a small DSO as an operator with less than 100,000 users, which means that we are addressing more than 2,200 small DSOs in Europe. ETRA’s participation in European projects and energy events will allow us to contact several of these entities and offer them the tool – trying to reach 25% of the market share, comments Lazaro.

A specific exploitation plan will be developed in a further stage of the project and included in Deliverable 8.3 once the products are finalized and tested according to the project work plan.