On November 26th and 27 the third Shift2DC Project General Assembly (GA) travelled do Tallinn, Estonia, hosted by project partners at TalTech. This is the third semesterly meeting following the project kick off meeting in December 2023 in Lisbon and the June meeting in Aachen, Germany. Every semester the project consortium meets in different European locations, providing an opportunity for partners to meet, share the latest project progress, and promote onsite discussions to establish targets for the upcoming months.
The November meeting brought together 31 consortium members attending onsite and over 15 joining remotely. The event started with a Welcome Note delivered by the GA host, Andrii Chub followed by an Opening from Hugo Morais, the project coordinator and researcher at INESC ID.
The first part of the day was dedicated as usual to a Project progress update, with a Management & Communication overview and an assessment of the work conducted under the operating Work Packages (WP), including milestones and deliverables.
After the project overview, participants were split in four parallel sessions, each focusing on one of Shift2DC’s Demonstrators:
- Data Centres Demonstrator by Fraunhofer IISB
- Commercial and Residential Buildings Demonstrator by EDF
- Industry Demonstrator by Phoenix Contact
- Port Digital Twin Demonstrator by ITI I IST ID
At the end of the meetings, all partners were back to main room for a Wrap-up of the discussions.
According to Hugo Morais ”One of the primary goals of this 3rd General Assembly was in fact to shift the focus from presenting solutions to start discussing results. One year into the project, we are now able to plan the work that will be implemented and tested across the four demonstrators, and this was the main ideal when we designed the agenda for this meeting. This GA, was an opportunity to engage in sessions dedicated to each demonstrator, outlining strategies for each Demo execution.”
More on the Shift2DC Demonstrators is available here.
Day 1 concluded with two working sessions “Protection plan, grounding and selectivity methodologies led by Schneider and “Advanced tools and methodologies for network design” led by EDF, which was followed followed by the GA traditional gathering for the group Photo.
The second day of the project General Assembly included a Workshop on Innovation and Exploitation Workshop led by the Project Innovation officer from EDP NEW Carlos Cardoso and a financial workshop led by the Project Financial Manager from INESC-ID, Ilda Ribeiro.
The day continued with a visit to TalTech – Tallinn University of Technology Residential DC Innovation Hub (first DC experience center in North Europe) and to the Power Electronics Group of TalTech LAB. These visits were a great opportunity for participants to witness firsthand the cutting-edge research being conducted at TalTech’s facilities.
In the afternoon, the Shift2DC consortium was part of the 5th Estonian DC Innovation Workshop, a half-day event focused on advancing DC research organized by i3DC and the Power Electronics Group of TalTech as part of the IEEE Estonian Section
At the event Shift2DC was presented by Hugo Morais with the talk titled “Shift to DC as a Critical Step Towards Energy Transition”. Other project partners also presented at the Workshop, including Ahmad Makkieh from Schneider Electric on “Empowering Innovation: Commercial Pathway of DC Solutions”; Holger Krings from Phoenix Contact on “Safe DC Connector and DC Circuit Breaker with Precharging” and Panos Kolios from DC Systems on “DC Standardization Status”.
The General Assembly in Tallinn was a productive two-day meeting and an important platform to define the project’s next steps and the best strategies to start implementing in the project Demonstrators to keep on supporting the project mission of reshaping the future of Direct Current in data centers, buildings, industry, and ports.
The next General Assembly will take place in six months in Bilbao, Spain!
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