The limitation of the primary energy sources and the carbon dioxide emissions are two of the most important societal challenges at present. In order to solve them, we need to significantly increase the usage share of renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaics, and to introduce local storage capacities. CONNECT investigated concepts, technologies and components that support enhanced integration of renewables and storage into the supply grid combined with intelligent management of the energy flow. It facilitated a decentralized energy infrastructure. This effort allowed to reduce the demand for primary energy, as well as to decrease the carbon dioxide emissions.
CONNECT researched new solutions for power conversion that were specifically developed for bidirectional power exchange with the grid.

The project developed high efficiency, low-cost, low-weight, and compact high-power density converters with embedded communication capabilities, for different application levels of the grid. Power quality optimization was also explored in order to avoid unnecessary energy flows in the grid. Thus, extended integration of local storages and renewables such as photovoltaic are supported by CONNECT. Moreover, CONNECT focused on developing monitoring approaches and advanced energy management algorithms, which take into account renewable energy sources, local storages and electric vehicles. As a key result, the peak power demand from the distribution grid could be reduced by at least 50% and the use of local generation, consumption and storage was optimized.

In order to fully exploit the advantages of the technologies mentioned before, it was necessary to enhance the data transmission capacity and security of the smart grid communication infrastructure. For this purpose, CONNECT developed solutions for high interoperable, high data rate local and wide area communication in the grid, which were complemented with enhanced security in order to protect this critical infrastructure against attacks and to ensure privacy and integrity. Particular effort was spent to minimize the power consumption of the developed solutions.