Engage PV

Development and demonstration of social, technical and economics innovations for improved sytem integration of photovoltaik

In order to achieve the European climate targets, the Renewable Energy Expansion Act was initiated in Austria, which creates essential framework conditions for the decarbonization of the energy sector. A central point is the supply of electricity from 100% renewable sources by 2030. To achieve this, photovoltaics should make an additional contribution of 11 TWh per year.
Essential for this is the optimized integration of photovoltaic systems. Solutions for this are available for individual plants in terms of self-consumption optimization, but the integration of large PV plants into virtual power plants is mostly motivated purely by energy economics. In the area of forecasting models, an open problem area is primarily short-term forecasting or nowcasting. Moreover, the current extent of PV expansion is not sufficient to achieve the expansion targets in terms of the energy transition.

Project goals
The goal of Engage PV is therefore to accelerate the participatory development and demonstration of integrated solutions in different, interdisciplinary networked innovation fields of action using open innovation approaches.The intention is, based on the fundamental requirements (technical, social, economic, regulatory/legal, forecasting), to develop appropriate individual solutions in an open innovation process, which are subsequently interconnected by an interdisciplinary team of experts to create and demonstrate overall solutions.

Research approach and methodolody
To achieve the goals set, the following solutions are approached:

• Efficient, socially acceptable and ecological land use in all areas and for all types of land, with a special focus on multi-use of land
• Social acceptance and motivational factors, in particular to create incentives for private investments in PV systems or to support measures to promote the integration of PV systems into the existing energy system
• Local, regional and supra-regional solutions for grid and system integration
• Use of new generation and load forecasts
• Energy-economical embedding / utilization of the generated energy
• Joint and standardized use of photovoltaic generation together with other forms of power generation and flexibilities, sector coupling and storage options - including virtual power plants