The PLATOON H2020 project was designed to bring a digital platform and analysis tools to the industry. Funded by the European Union, its objective is to propose concrete solutions for the digitisation of the energy sector with breakthrough technologies, thus supporting the transition to zero carbon and the development of new services in the energy field.

In an increasingly complex and heterogeneous environment, the PLATOON H2020 project aims to enable the evolution from a traditional centralised energy sector to a more distributed sector, with intermittent renewable energy sources and new extended digital capabilities. While contributing to artificial intelligence, interoperability, privacy and data security, PLATOON meets the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) standards, aiming to achieve the first IDS-compliant data market for the energy sector.

The project will be validated in 7 pilots in 5 countries (France, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Serbia), addressing real cases of Big Data in the energy sector. PLATOON’s pilots cover the full range of energy services along the supply chain, such as energy efficiency, power balance and predictive maintenance of wind farms, smart cities, buildings and office centres, with the objective of increasing operating performance through physical models and AI algorithms.
In addition, PLATOON’s pilots focus on power grid stability, connectivity and life extension, advanced energy management systems and micro-grid energy management. PLATOON will facilitate technology transfer to the market through a well-established tendering process via open calls for tenders.

The digitisation of the energy sector should, according to experts, enable higher levels of operational excellence to be achieved through the adoption of breakthrough technologies. The “Energy Big Data” framework of modern smart energy networks is the ideal ecosystem for exploiting knowledge from data. ENGIE, among others, is working hard to make the transition to zero carbon possible for businesses and local authorities worldwide.

To implement this transition, ENGIE offered integrated solutions in the form of a service to reduce energy consumption and improve energy efficiency. The company is coordinating the PLATOON project via ENGIE Lab CRIGEN. The latter is the group’s corporate R&D centre and is part of the ENGIE Labs network.

According to the PLATOON project coordinator, Dr Philippe Calvez, head of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAI Lab), the PLATOON project will enable ENGIE to strengthen the development of its ambitious strategy, explore new business models, develop interoperable intelligent solutions and advanced and integrated decision tools, while interacting with the actors involved in this ecological and energy revolution.

PLATOON will deploy distributed data processing and analysis technologies for an optimized management of energy systems in real time. Data governance between different stakeholders for multi-stakeholder data exchange, coordination and cooperation in the energy value chain will be ensured by a data governance framework, which is compliant with the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) standards.

This exchange environment will be transformed into an open and reliable data market allowing secure data exchange and the guarantee of data sovereignty in accordance with IDSA principles. The IDS framework formed by data containers, brokers and the market itself, within the PLATOON reference architecture, guarantees data governance and the secure transfer of data from the data owner to the technology provider.

According to the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), the PLATOON project enables the application of innovative data architectures that can facilitate the fusion and processing of distributed data belonging to various stakeholders in a market configuration. In addition, the project will develop and use the flexible capabilities of the Global Interoperable Smart Grid Architecture (COSMAG) to build and deploy scalable and replicable energy management solutions. COSMAG enables the interoperability of heterogeneous data sources, formats and interfaces, while ensuring governance and security of data from multiple data owners and providers and ease of use by energy experts without deep mathematical knowledge.

Thanks to PLATOON’s well-established tendering procedure through open calls for tenders, technology transfer to the market is systematically made possible. This represents a key opportunity to verify the real commercial impact of the project, by demonstrating the maturity and impact of the new technologies to energy agents.

Thus, the creation of an ecosystem/open market for advanced analytical solutions in Europe will be encouraged, allowing utilities to capitalise on the value of energy data. Over the last decade, the consortium partner Minsait, as an Indra company, being a major technology player in Europe, has already integrated relevant technologies into its energy management products. For the Mihajlo Pupin Institute, PLATOON will offer the possibility to deploy project results for reliable energy production and consumption forecasting in order to provide an efficient smart grid and user-oriented services. Pupin has a predominant market share in Serbia in terms of control and supervision of power generation by hydro, thermal and photovoltaic power plants, wind farms, as well as electricity transmission and distribution.

The digitisation of the energy sector requires new, locally specific control solutions with real-time data processing. “By participating in different PLATOON pilots, we aim to develop new algorithms and address different scenarios on site,” explains Andrej Campa, independent development engineer at ComSensus.

Pau Joan Cortés Forteza, head of the research department of Sampol Ingenieria y obras, said that

“PLATOON will integrate solutions related to digitization by associating Industry 4.0 solutions with energy experts, thus designing the smart grid of the future. Digitization will play an important role in this path, monitoring and analyzing every watt wasted. The EU is leading us, with projects like PLATOON, towards responsible energy consumption and a more advanced society, where ecology is a commodity”.

Jose I. Hormaeche, Director General of the Basque Energy Cluster (CEPV), agrees:

“As a cluster organisation, we believe that the results of PLATOON will be essential to facilitate access to and use of data in the energy sector. The architecture to be defined, the analytical tools to be developed and the data governance standards to be implemented should enable companies in the different segments of the energy value chain to share data and cooperate to get real value from the data collected from energy assets”.

PLATOON has an undeniable potential to enable the modernisation of European energy networks through the introduction of innovative solutions. By introducing new implementations of distributed/leading edge data processing and analysis, PLATOON seeks to use data as a resource for maximising energy efficiency. As PLATOON’s approach seeks to address all elements of the value chain, the protection of end-users’ interests and the creation of a climate of trust are essential conditions to ensure that this project has a positive impact and that its results can be adopted by the EU energy sector.

Adrian Quesada Rodriguez, Project Director and DPD at Mandat International, confirmed that :

“In this context, we will focus on ensuring compliance with the relevant ethical and legal requirements (with emphasis on the protection of personal data). We seek to foster end-users’ trust in PLATOON by building on the experience gained through a long track record of successful H2020 research projects and the multidisciplinary expertise that has always characterized our organization”.

Translated from Focus sur le projet PLATOON H2020 pour numériser le secteur de l’énergie avec des technologies de rupture