FARCROSS will facilitate cross-border electricity flows through innovation
The European Union needs to establish a geographically extensive market and enhance its cross-border electrical interconnections to achieve its energy objectives. This will increase competition levels, ensure electricity supply security, and enhance the integration of renewable energy sources. Aligned with this goal, FARCROSS was launched—a European project that kicked off in Athens last October, with the CIRCE technology center as a participant.
FARCROSS aims to address this challenge by connecting all players in the energy value chain through the design, implementation, and demonstration of innovative integrated hardware and software solutions.
This approach will strengthen collaboration between electricity system operators and transmission operators, as well as improve coordination between these entities and producers. The result will be improved regional electricity flows, enhanced grid stability and flexibility, and optimized resource management and allocation, including transmission and generation.
These advancements will lead to significant economic savings by reducing the need for new infrastructure and integrating a larger proportion of renewable generation. Simultaneously, this will reduce environmental impact compared to other alternatives. Over the next three years, a consortium of 31 interdisciplinary actors from 16 European countries will carry out the FARCROSS project, funded with €13.6 million through the European Commission’s H2020 program.
Within this project, CIRCE will be responsible for implementing an Extended Area Protection, Automation, and Control System applied to Cross-Border Transmission Systems. The project will be executed in three phases: initially, barriers to innovation and international cooperation will be removed through national regulations; subsequently, demonstration cases will be developed; and finally, a cost-benefit analysis, an evaluation of demonstration results, and a scalability and replicability document at the European Union level will be conducted.
