In March, the Lighthouse Project Team, international experts and members of the ISGAN Executive Committee had met in Copenhagen, Denmark, to exchange knowledge and insights aimed at fostering the development of smart distribution grids – a critical facilitator of the global clean energy transition.
The participants analysed actor groups’ roles, responsibilities and tasks, as well as challenges and needs in the different phases of planning and implementation. A month later, the experts came together again in order to structure the results collected in Copenhagen.
They found out that four main aspects play an essential role in the process: A long-term planning and implementation cycle, the preconditions from a legal and governance framework to reduce uncertainties for the planning process, collaboration as a precondition for planning and implementation and last, but not least information and knowledge infrastructure requirements.
Now, the Lighthouse Project Team has continued and gone on to sort the material collected in another workshop which took place last week. The workshop included putting heads together to find overarching questions for each phase/categories and subsequently composing short overviews of the most essential aspects to consider.
Upcoming activities in the Lighthouse Project will be a survey and a series of online workshops focusing on the preconditions and development needs of distribution grids in countries and regions in different parts of the world. Findings of the Project will be presented in conjunction with the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM15) meeting in Brazil, scheduled for October this year. Through this contribution, ISGAN aims to highlight key policy priorities for enabling smart distribution grids to contribute to meeting the global community’s pledges to triple renewable energy capacity and efficiency, as articulated during the COP28 conference in Dubai last year.