The PROMOTioN project strongly depends on experience and input from various stakeholder groups, such as policymakers, industry and academic and research institutions. Their input and contributions are of particular interest to the project consortium, in order to compare project results and/or interim solutions to expert opinions from outside the project.
Roughly six months after the launch of PROMOTioN, the kick-off stakeholder workshop was organised in Brussels on 29 June 2016. At this one-day event, the general challenges and benefits of meshed HVDC offshore grids were discussed with around 50 attendees from all over Europe. The event featured guest speaker contributions from Marie Donnelly (DG Energy), Claude Turmes (MEP), Jan Hensmans (Belgian Directorate-General for Energy) and Andrew Ho (WindEurope).
In addition to regular stakeholder workshops, the PROMOTioN Reference Group was also established. The Reference Group convened its first meeting on 29 September 2016 in Hamburg, alongside the WindEnergy Expo 2016 and the WindEurope Summit 2016.
The general objective of the Reference Group is to provide additional feedback and input from outside the project consortium. It is a closed assembly, similar to an advisory group, which meets on an annual basis. It consists of key industry players and of national/European policymakers, researchers and regulators. The Reference Group represents a direct link to the stakeholder community and consists of 20-25 members.
The first meeting provided a great introduction to the socio-economic environment, presented by Edwin Haesen from Ecofys, and technical benefits of meshed HVDC grids, highlighted by Prof. Tim Green from the Imperial College London. In addition, a number of work-in-progress methods and considerations of project partners related to functional requirements, a roadmap for meshed HVDC grids and the respective cost-benefit analysis were presented and led to valuable in-depth discussions among the Reference Group attendees. The meeting was followed by a presentation of the PROMOTioN project at the DNV GL booth at WindEnergy Hamburg.
Closing the year, workshops were held in Edinburgh (5 October 2016) and Hamburg (17 November 2016) within the scope of task 1.3 of the project. In order to complement the information gathered by a questionnaire on 'Best Practices on HVDC projects', experts from manufacturers, developers, TSOs, governments, regulators and academia discussed the lessons learned from existing projects and thereby contributed to PROMOTioN's future approaches and methods.
Download Brussels Stakeholder Kick-Off Workshop Recap (ZIP 28MB)