TwinEU

The current international situation makes the process of energy transition more critical for Europe than ever before.  It is a key requirement to increase the penetration of renewables while aiming at making the infrastructure more resilient and cost-effective. In this context, digital twins (DT) build a key asset to facilitate all aspects of business and operational coordination for system operators and market parties. It is of fundamental importance to now start a process of agreement at European level so not to develop isolated instances but a federated ecosystem of DT solutions. Each operator should be able to make its own implementation decisions while preserving and supporting interoperability and exchange with the remaining ecosystem. Exactly this is the vision of the TwinEU consortium under the leadership of Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT (coordinator Prof. Antonello Monti) and its Center for Digital Energy: enabling new technologies to foster an advanced concept of DT while determining the conditions for interoperability, data and model exchanges through standard interfaces and open APIs to external actors. The envisioned DT will build the kernel of European data exchange supported by interfaces to the Energy Data Space under development. Advanced modelling supported by AI tools and able to exploit High Performance Computing infrastructure will deliver an unprecedented capability to observe, test and activate a pan-European digital replica of the European energy infrastructure.

Fraunhofer FIT is involved in the definition of use cases, leading the task which defines energy stakeholders’ requirements on the digital twin of the pan-European grid. FIT is also involved in the design of TwinEU’s open architecture for digital twin, leading the task which defines cybersecurity and data privacy requirements, and in the design of the IT for the federated digital twin dataspace. In the German demo, FIT is involved in developing dynamic monitoring of the grid. FIT is also active in homogenising the results from the demos’ digital twins to ensure that they are transferable to a pan-European digital twin implementation.

TwinEU will run from 01.01.2024 to 31.12.2026 with a total budget of over 25M€ (funding of the European Commission of about 20M€).

TwinEU will leverage a unique set of competences coming from grid and market operators, technology providers and research centres to create a concept of Pan-European digital twin based on the federation of local twins so to enable a reliable, resilient, and safe operation of the infrastructure while facilitating new business models that will accelerate the deployment of renewable energy sources in Europe.

The challenges TwinEU faces are lack of consensus on the definition of a digital twin and its functionalities, the insufficient synchronization of digital models/replicas with real assets, and the lack of concrete reusable DTs implementations at pan-European level. Furthermore, there is a lack of an agreed standardizable approach to grid modelling which fits to everybody, insufficient understanding of Interoperable DTs as an effective way to support cross-stakeholder cooperation and respective data sharing and exchange. DTs also need interfaces outside the energy sector to cover challenges such as resilience assessment and planning so that a link between a European DT and a European Energy Data Space is critical. Finally, a DT cannot be simply developed but needs to be tested at an unprecedented scale.

TwinEU will address these challenges by

• defining a set of scenarios for the use of digital twin that will benefit from data sharing and exchange among operators (intra and cross-country) and the corresponding requirements for implementation.
• defining and implementing a Reference Architecture for the creation of a European-scale digital twin
• defining and implementing a federated digital twin, consisting of a variety of closed loop adaptive DT instances, to support European-level wider replication.
• enhancing data models and semantic interoperability to better support the digital twin use cases.
• leveraging on and adapting the emerging concept of energy data space to break data silos across energy value chain stakeholders, facilitate trusted and sovereignty-preserving data, model and computational resource cross-stakeholder sharing.
• leveraging advanced technologies such as physics-informed AI and High-Performance Computing to go beyond classical modelling approaches for digital twin.
• developing and deploying a variety of DTs services which will create the conditions for a more resilient and reliable European power network.
• demonstrating the TwinEU approach in real scenarios validating the complete energy and data value chains
• achieving large adoption of the TwinEU approach creating the condition for a real implementation at European scale.
• creating the conditions for the long-term sustainability development of the TwinEU vision and open new business opportunities based on DT.

The TwinEU consortium, consisting of 75 partners, brings together multidisciplinary expertise and resources from both industry and the research community. The demonstrations will involve key actors at all levels; from transmission and distribution to market participants, and will test coordinated data exchange across different domains. The consortium also includes relevant industrial companies, research institutions, and associations from 15 EU countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Spain.