The Programme concerns the funding of research projects with industrial research and experimental development activities of technological maturity 4-7 (TRL 4-7), which aim at developing technological solutions to be exploited by energy production, storage, transmission and distribution organisations. The proposals submitted under this Call for Proposals should fall under one of the following Specific Objectives, addressing challenges faced by electricity generation and transmission organisations.

Specific Objectives:

Analysis of Lightning Activity on Transmission Lines
Challenge Description: Transmission lines (TL) are often struck by lightning due to their height and length. Lightning strikes on TL can lead to power outages due to the activation of switching elements but also to equipment failure/damage (e.g. insulators).
Indicative Solution: Development and installation of a sensor system to record lightning activity along the lines (e.g. every 5 km) and development of software to analyse the recorded data. The software will accelerate: a) the detection of the fault location in reduced time compared to traditional patrol, b) the evaluation of the system reliability indicators and c) the evaluation of the asset management indicators.

Monitoring of substations through thermal imaging
Challenge Description: Transmission substations include a set of devices to manage and control (e.g., transformers, power switches, protection relays) the power flow. Their maintenance is periodically performed to ensure the safety and reliability of the substations. EAC performs maintenance of its equipment at regular intervals in accordance with the manufacturers’ instructions and the internal directive, without any prior assessment of the health of the equipment. There are software on the market that based on the database and measurements provide the operational capability of the equipment using health indicators (asset health index AHI). However, their use requires a large workload of data introduction for each element of the equipment, and they sometimes require data that does not exist historically, as well as a limitation in the accessibility of the introduced data.
Indicative Solution: Development of Methodology-Algorithm to evaluate the operational status of transmission substations and optimize the maintenance program. The methodology based on international standards and practices could be implemented in the form of a computational algorithm that is fully applicable to the topology of the elements that comprise the transmission substations of EAC. The calculation of health indicators could take as input data a set of quantities that are monitored: a) by equipment monitoring systems (e.g. SF6 gas level in GIS) and b) in the context of preventive maintenance inspections (e.g. thermal imaging), results of DGA oil analyses. It is essential to provide full transparency and accessibility to all input, output data as well as intermediately calculated values, so that reports and other statistics can be derived at will based on the data in the database. Finally, based on the extracted health indicators, the equipment will be calibrated in terms of its functional capacity, and a maintenance and replacement schedule will be prepared in which the chronological order of maintenance of each element will also depend on its health status.

Fault detection on the transmission lines
Challenge Description: The design and installation of a reliable high-complexity fault protection and remote fault protection system in high-voltage transmission lines is a critical challenge in modern power grids. Currently, remote fault protection is the first and main part for electrical protection of transmission lines. Using real-time calculations with the help of voltage and current transformers, the actual impedance of the conductor is estimated and response is according to certain predefined ranges. However, in real conditions, the actual impedance is affected by the prevailing weather conditions (air temperature, soil moisture, etc.) deviating from its nominal values. It is therefore vital to incorporate intelligent tools that will be able to retrieve weather variations, re-estimate impedance ranges and automatically integrate changes in the configuration of the protection relay. In this way, more accurate fault detection and location could be achieved, increasing the overall safety and reliability of the system.
Indicative Solution: Development of a system that will provide the possibility to change-adjust the settings of the Main Protection on the Transmission Lines for the valid detection of faults.

Holistic Management of Small PV/Dispersed Generation in the Electricity Grid
Challenge Description: The rapid increase of RES penetration in the Grid and their expected further increase in the coming years, combined with the absence or delayed availability of management tools, creates particularly difficult challenges for the Grid.
Indicative Solution: The development of a specialized platform for the management of all small PV Parks using all available telecommunication tools in order to:
a) Monitor the production
b) Control/cutback the production
c) Send and modification of operational setting of the respective voltage converters.

Energy storage systems
Challenge description: Cyprus has one of the lowest rates of renewable energy production from RES which specifically amounted to 13.8% in 2018 and about 14% in 2019, compared to the EU average of 20%. Renewable energy production currently amounts to 157.5 MW from wind, 125 MW from solar and 12.8 MW from biomass. To meet the EU targets, Cyprus needs to change its energy mix in favour of renewables to 23% by 2030. The increase in renewable energy consumption will require an increase in production of 360 MW. While there are currently more than 17,000 very small systems installed that exceed 65MW in production, there is no storage capacity. Therefore, optimal utilisation of renewable energy requires the simultaneous development of efficient electricity storage technologies.
Indicative Solution: Develop efficient and economic energy storage systems that can be used together with smart energy demand management to achieve proper management and optimisation of energy allocation between grid and storage.

Use of state-of-the-art digital technologies in the field of electricity generation, storage, transmission, and distribution (including High Performance Computing, Quantum Technologies, Internet of Things, Machine Learning, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, etc.)