Developing the digital energy system of the future

Systems controlling electricity supply to Europe’s homes will be completely remodelled in a drive to develop the digital energy system of the future.

The vision is for a smart power supply network that manages real-time supply and demand and lets major players in the energy sector safely communicate and share data.



Brunel University London will guide British, French, German, Portuguese, Belgium and Slovenian research institutes and national power suppliers to design and develop a fully interoperable power system.

Twelve organisations including EDF Energy and European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSOE-E) met at Brunel to launch their three-year TDX-ASSIST project.

TDX-ASSIST is short for Transmission and Distribution data eXchanges for renewables integration in the European marketplace through Advanced, Scalable and Secure ICT Systems and Tools/. Its goal is to help the two types of electricity networks communicate.

That is transmission, which carries electricity long distances across countries at high voltage, and distribution, which runs at lower voltages to take electricity from the transmission system into homes and businesses. Other aims are managing bottlenecks in electricity supply, monitoring and supervising the network in real-time, and planning for attacks and threats.

Professor Gareth Taylor from Brunel Institute of Power Systems (BIPS) is leading the work. He said: “The aim is to design, develop and demonstrate a new generation of ICT tools and techniques to underpin scalable and secure information systems and data exchange between Transmission System Operators (TSOs) and Distribution System Operators (DSOs).”

“The goal is TSO-DSO interoperability. While TSO-TSO interoperability is well established by ENTSO-E through the Common Grid Model Exchange System, TSO-DSO interoperability will also benefit future TSO-TSO interoperability,” Prof Taylor said.

“This cutting edge project will be a key enabler for the large-scale integration of renewable energy systems thereby enabling Europe to meet future climate change mitigation targets”

Backed by Europe’s Horizon 2020 fund, TDX-ASSIST will also build new data access portals to help key players in the electrical power sector do business.

TDX-ASSIST (Coordination of Transmission and Distribution data eXchanges for renewables integration in the European marketplace through Advanced, Scalable and Secure ICT Systems and Tools) is one of five successful projects picked from 54 proposals in Europe’s LCE-01-2016-2017 Technologies for integrating renewables in energy system €19m call.