CEA is the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives), a public body established in October 1945. CEA is the largest technology research and development provider in France, whose role is to transfer this know-how to the industry. CEA has staff of about 16000 people, a budget of 4.3 billion Euros per year, and has filed more than 650 priority patents. The CEA operates ten research centres in France, each specializing in specific fields.

CEA is operating today more than 350 people at INES, the French institute of solar energy, which has started operations in 2005. After a strong phase of growth, today ten CEA-labs at INES cover the complete value chain of photovoltaics: material, cells, modules, solar systems, and storage systems. Furthermore, three labs deal with energy in buildings.

With the aim to maximise the penetration of solar system in the electricity network, research efforts are made on smartgrids, energy management, demand response and grid coupled storage systems. These efforts are demonstrated on the INES campus, which has benefited from large investments, for example a multi microgrid platform with a PV system of 160 kW. Another demonstration example is the solar mobility station, where our energy management system assures the solar charging of electric vehicles and the minimisation of the resulting grid impact.

The following labs participate in this project:

• The lab of intelligent electricity systems develops management and control strategies of any complex electricity system for efficient smart grid integration or stand-alone operation. This are on one side predictive algorithms which use production and consumption forecasting for energy management, and on the other side real time system control algorithms.
• The lab for Artificial Intelligence for Renewables Energies has been created in 2016 to bring together advanced data analysis tools for energy efficiency issues. The aim is to develop and integrate specific data processing schemes to understand system behavior within monitoring strategies, learn energy usage from real data in order to anticipate and optimize the consumer needs thanks to statistical forecasting in order to optimize the global energy efficiency. The keypoint of the team is to be a joined laboratory between two CEA institutes in order to deal with high level expertise in both fields: data analysis and energetic system integration.

MAIN TASK ATTRIBUTED IN THE PROJECT

• Work package 7 leader
• Development of the infrastructure dedicated to the open experience feedback
• Tools and methodology for optimal use of storage as a source of flexibility