The European Commission has approved grant of €86.6 million proposed by the French state as part of the future investment programme to fund the Institut pour la Transition Energétique, aka the ‘ITE SuperGrid Institute’.
After getting approval for the project in March 2012, the Institute, which is headquartered in Villeurbanne near Lyon, was created in January 2014 by twelve shareholders from the electricity sector in France, which included companies and academic partners ‘in the spirit of scientific collaboration’. The aims of the institute form part of a large research project on technologies for future transport networks and mass storage of electric power that will improve energy management and favour renewable energy integration.
The research programmes conducted in the frame of the SuperGrid Institute gather together partners with complementary expertise including the industrial companies Alstom, Nexans, RTE, EDF, Vettiner (Lyon), Ion Beam Services (Aix-en-Provence), Novasic (Chambéry), and the public institutions Ecole Centrale Lyon, INSA Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Grenoble Institute of Technology, Supelec and the Université Paris Sud, together with Laboratoire Ampère (Lyon), CREMHyG (Grenoble), Laboratoire de Génie Electrique de Grenoble and Laboratoire Signaux and Systems (Gif-sur-Yvette).
The institute will have several testing platforms in France that will support five research programmes on high voltage AC and DC, and energy storage. The institute will also develop related activities in the areas of rail traction chains, hydraulic pumps and turbines, and electric storage technologies.
The Supergrid is a system for transmitting electricity that can deliver energy from renewable sources, partly located in the sea, on a large-scale basis to the centres where it is consumed. Philippe Auriol, Chairman of SuperGrid Institute, said, "Financial support from the French state is essential to the implementation of this ambitious project for the Institute and its partners; it will provide operators with the most modern power grid solutions, thereby contributing to the globalisation of energy infrastructure."
