On October 23-24, 2024, the NEWGEN partners gathered in Lyon, France, for the 2-year consortium meeting, hosted by the SuperGrid Institute. This in-person meeting offered a great chance to review progress and jointly strategize on advancing the project’s goal of strengthening electricity system reliability and resilience by developing next-generation HVDC insulation materials, cables, and systems.
Over the course of two days, participants discussed the progress and future plans for various aspects of the project, including the synthesis and screening of novel additives and HVDC insulation prototypes, optimization of cable extrusion equipment and processes, life cycle assessment of cable manufacturing and usage, advancements in defect detection and condition monitoring, as well as the development and validation of life and reliability models for HVDC cables. Moreover, WP5 leader CLIC Innovation organized the exploitation workshop where NEWGEN project consortium members had selected the most important key exploitable results from NEWGEN. The project consortium members worked in groups on identifying the next steps towards exploiting these mid-term NEWGEN project results.
During the onsite-meeting, NEWGEN partners also had the opportunity to visit SuperGrid Institute’s research facility, where they gained more understanding of SuperGrid Institute’s specialized HVDC expertise, technologies, and solutions for facilitating large-scale renewable energy integration into the grid. The visit offered a close look at SuperGrid Institute’s advanced labs dedicated to dielectric material characterization and ageing, high voltage tests, and innovative monitoring methods for HVDC and MVDC cables & equipment. It provided valuable insights into SuperGrid Institute’s work on the NEWGEN project, including dielectric testing on flat materials and model cables, and leakage current measurement innovations for pre-fault detection.
Building on insights from these discussions and two years of accomplishments, the NEWGEN consortium has committed to ongoing collaboration to drive the sustainable development of HVDC cable and electrical systems.