French island regions to take energy to the cutting edge

Three island regions of France will become test grounds for deployment of a variety of smart-grid technologies, including real-time home energy monitoring, distributed renewable generation and battery storage.

The project, being led by Electricite de France (EDF), will roll out on the islands of Corsica in the Mediterranean, Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles and La Reunion, which lies east of Madagascar. Other companies participating in the project include BPL Global, Delta Dore, Edelia, Saft, Schneider Electric and Tenesol.

Known as Millener, the €30.2 million (about $42 million) project is one of the first in Europe to integrate management of a thousand diverse distributed energy resources at the edge of the distribution grid.

“Deployment and integrated management of solar generation, battery storage and customer load are a vital part of our smart-grid strategy,” said Jean-Michel Deveza, director of the smart grids program at EDF’s Insular Power Systems Division. “This project is designed to better integrate distributed renewable energy, improve the stability of power systems and identify sustainable economic models.”

The Millener project will deploy distributed resources like solar energy systems, battery storage and energy load controllers at the homes of participating utility customers. Residents in the program will also be supplied with monitors to help their visualize their energy consumption in real time. EDF plans to manage all these distributed resources using BPL Global’s Power SG platform as a centralized control system to optimize the electricity netwrok’s operational, financial and environmental performance.