Blog
Jun 19

Shift2DC partners together in Aachen for the Six-Month General Assembly

On June 12th and 13th, the Shift2DC Project hosted its 2nd General Assembly meeting, six months after the kickoff meeting in December 2023 in Lisbon, Portugal. 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 June meeting took place in Aachen, Germany, hosted by RWTH University mainly organized by Benedict Mortimer and Katharina Hetzenecker. With an attendance of 34 consortium members and over 15 joining remotely, the event started with a Welcome Note by Prof. De Doncker (RWTH) followed by an Opening by the project Coordinator and researcher at INESC ID, Hugo Morais.

Hugo highlighted that “one of the main objectives of this 2nd GA is to define the project expected results and the business models that will be used in the technologies developed under the project. We plan to discuss what will in fact be delivered, namely: the hardware to be installed and the software tools that will be used in the Demos, the main KPIs that will be adopted to measure the success of the DC solutions. Hugo also reinforced the goal to have a success rate of 100%.”

The first day was dedicated to an overview of the Project, starting with Management & Communication activities (INESC ID), followed by a Project progress update, offering an overview of the four operating Work Packages (WP), including milestones and deliverables. The kickoff meeting of WP5 was hosted during the GA.

In the afternoon, onsite participants attended four Working Groups, each focusing on one of Shift2DC’s Demonstrators:

  • Data Centres Demonstrator by Fraunhofer, titled “Design and Specification, Operation Simulation, Installation and Commissioning, Operation and Monitoring, Analysis of Results.”
  • Commercial and Residential Buildings Demonstrator by EDF, under the topic “Context of Commercial and Residential Buildings in France.”
  • Industry Demonstrator by Phoenix Contact, focusing on “MVDC and LVDC Grids, Industry Machinery, and the Use of Digital Twins for Simulation.”
  • Port Digital Twin Demonstrator by IST ID I ITI, covering “Monitoring Systems, Digital Twin Simulations of DC Solutions in a Port Environment.”

More on the Shift2DC Demonstrators is available here.

The second day of the project General Assembly included a Workshop on Innovation Strategies, promoted by EDP NEW, but was mostly dedicated to RWTH Aachen University Lab tours to showcase applications and innovations in DC technology.

The General Assembly in Aachen was a productive two-day meeting and an important platform to define the project’s next steps and the best solutions, tools, and devices to reshape the future of Direct Current in data centers, buildings, industry, and ports.

The next General Assembly will take place in six months in Tallinn, Estonia, organized by Taltech (Tallinn University of Technology) in partnership with the Fifth Estonian Residential DC Innovation Workshop promoted by the i3DC Initiative.