The action will set up a joint programming initiative to develop Smart, Integrated, Regional Energy Systems that enable regions and local communities to realize their high ambitions of moving towards decarbonised energy systems and at the same time link them to a secure and resilient European energy system. This shall include solutions that allow for a high proportion of renewables up to and beyond 100% in the local or regional supply. The initiative will coordinate relevant RDD programs in the involved European, associated countries and regions represented in the consortium connecting them with other funding and financing partners. It will accelerate the deployment of latest resource-efficient and decarbonising energy system solutions, thus strengthening the competitiveness in relevant markets and lerveraging sustainable structures already established by ERA-Net Smart Grids Plus . The latter is focussing on the broad involvement of a large number of countries and regions in order to implement European smart electricity grids research agendas, while the ERA-Net SG+ RegSys will build on this with a new approach, developing integrated, regional energy systems, including the full spectrum of energy carriers and infrastructures. A highly ambitious consortium will pilot new formats of collaboration with regional and local stakeholders as well as supply and demand side oriented technology policy.

"From local trials to a European knowledge community". The challenges of modernising the electricity grids in Europe lies in enabling an increased flexibility of the European power system, efficiently providing increased transfer capacity and enabling an active participation of users and new market actors (by providing the information, services, market architectures and privacy guarantees). To address these challenges, innovation is needed in system integration, interoperable technologies, services, tools, co-ordination schemes, business processes, market architectures and regulatory regimes to plan, build, monitor, control and safely operate end-to-end networks in an open, competitive, decarbonised, sustainable and climate-change resilient market, under normal and emergency conditions. The major challenge is now to overcome the fragmentation of knowledge and accelerate knowledge exchange between the already existing demonstration projects and R&D initiatives with the goal to enable them to develop European wide interoperable solutions, according to a common reference architecture. With this, critical masses shall be reached in the development of a European market for smart grids technology providers and smart grids service providers. This initiative does not intend to find the final specifications for smart grids, but to organise the learning down to regional Smart Grids stakeholders, beyond the demonstration phase towards implementation. The overall goal of the “ERA-Net Smart Grids Plus” is to support deep knowledge sharing between regional and European Smart Grids initiatives by financing 15-20 transnational projects on applied research, piloting and demonstration in the field of Smart Grids, taking a next step in Smart Grids development building on the knowledge base, R&D initiatives as well as research and demonstration facilities already in place at regional, national and European level. It will coordinate during 2015-19 national and regional RDD budgets of more than 30 M€.