Vision on technology

One of the key activities pursued at the energy department of VITO is developing demand response control systems and architectures enabling society to make the transition to an energy system harboring distributed renewable production and an increased electrification. An important topic in our demand response research is oriented towards applying state of the art in control theory to real-life problems and finding the best match between performance and practicality, i.e. finding the best approach for each problem. Through this, we aim to reduce the gap between research and industry, giving our SME’s a strategic advantage and providing feedback to academic research. In smile-IT VITO will be involved in all activities concerning smart grids, i.e. setting up requirements with strong interaction with user committee and finally evaluating the concepts developed in a hybrid simulation environment containing both detailed simulation models and actual hardware in the loop. VITO has a strong focus on implementation and practicality being an applied research institute, however we are also involved in developing more advanced control algorithms. As such the main added value of VITO is being the cement between research and application for the smart grid scenario.