Project description
Securing the future of renewable energy
The global energy transition demands secure, efficient, and sustainable energy distribution systems to support growing renewable electricity demands. Without such advancements, reliance on fossil fuels will persist, risking environmental damage and large-scale blackouts. With this in mind, the EU-funded SAFEPOWER project will develop next-generation power converters for solar applications. These converters integrate AI-assisted Condition and Health Monitoring (C&HM) for predictive maintenance, use rugged Silicon Carbide (SiC) and emerging Gallium Oxide power devices for compact, sustainable designs, and feature innovative control schemes for enhanced efficiency. SAFEPOWER’s solutions also extend to offshore wind energy, boosting EU competitiveness in renewable energy technologies. By enabling secure and cost-effective maintenance, SAFEPOWER paves the way for a resilient, decarbonised energy future.
Objective
"Electrification coupled with renewable electricity supply is a key pathway to achieve a deep decarbonization of our society and contribute to an energy transition in a sustainable way. The electric energy demand based on distributed renewable sources is going to be even more important and a more efficient, secure, flexible and affordable energy distribution should be envisaged for the next future. If these requirements are not met, the replacement of well-established solutions based on fossil fuels will be unfeasible. Consequently, apart from the evident environmental impacts, collateral effects could occur, such as great blackouts at national and continental level. In this scenario, SAFEPOWER first explores and investigates on essential digital, enabling, and emerging technologies to achieve a new generation of power converters for solar applications: i) capable of anticipating failures to prevent downtime using effective Condition and Health Monitoring (C&HM) solutions assisted by AI strategies, ii) based on more compactly-packaged, efficient, rugged and affordable Silicon Carbide (SiC) power MOSFETs, diodes and solid-state DC breakers with a more sustainable manufacturing, and iii) prospecting on Ga2O3-based emerging power devices (MESFETs, diodes and solid-state DC breakers) especially designed for this application. Leveraging these technologies, SAFEPOWER studies and proposes new converter topologies and control schemes to enhance their compactness, sustainability, competitiveness, and security. Additionally, these technologies streamline cost-effective maintenance through AI-assisted intervention plans and AI-enabled ""limp mode"" operation with derating strategies, which can be extended to offshore wind energy conversion. Therefore, the adoption of SAFEPOWER's technological solutions in the EU solar sector not only will establish a competitive advantage against non-EU power converter manufacturers, but also will enable their initial deployment within the EU."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistryinorganic compounds
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicstopology
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrymetalloids
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HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
28006 Madrid
Spain