TAURON’s Strategic Research Agenda (SAB) is the first document in the Polish energy sector describing precisely the development directions of innovation.

For TAURON Group, it means four main areas:
- customer and its needs,
- smart grid services,
- scattered energy,
- low-emission generation technologies.

TAURON Group’s Strategy assumes that in 2015, 25 per cent of the revenue of the Group will originate from new businesses. The development of the research and innovation area is one of the tools to achieve this goal, therefore, the decision has been made to allocate annually minimum 0.4 per cent of accumulated revenues of the Group to this area.

- The Strategic Research Agenda is the “roadmap” in the area of research, development and innovation we intend to implement in TAURON Group. It is the first document of this type in the Polish energy sector which describes so precisely the directions of innovation development and specifies details of our Business Strategy. Even now TAURON is distinguished on the market of its modern product solutions. The SAB indicates both challenges and opportunities to be faced by the Group, simultaneously defining where we perceive new business deals we would like to engage in and what is our long-term vision of innovation development in TAURON Group – says Filip Grzegorczyk the President of the Management Board of TAURON Polska Energia.

The technological solutions sought are developed under internal projects and with the participation of business partners and the scientific community. TAURON Group also intends to increase the cooperation with providers of technology and know-how, represented both by large industrial concerns and by small companies - mainly start-ups.

Four main directions of innovation development defined in the TAURON Group’s Strategy are currently detailed in the Strategic Research Agenda. For each direction, a separate portfolio of projects was established, within which key challenges, development objectives and research areas have been defined. Such construction of the SAB will support the process of selecting specific projects and rejecting others, as well as enable optimum allocation of financial resources.

- The first presented portfolio of the Strategic Research Agenda of TAURON refers to Smart Grid Services. TAURON Group is the largest electricity distributor in Poland, therefore, as a leader we want to develop competence related to the tools for energy management, technologies of data acquisition and processing and communication services. Even today we carry out nine research and development projects aiming to enhance the quality of grid services provided by TAURON and develop their new types. Three consecutive research and development projects related to Smart Home, Smart City and energy storage are under preparation– says Jarosław Broda, Vice-President of the Management Board of TAURON Polska Energia for Asset Management and Development. 

The scope of the first portfolio is determined by three development objectives to which the specific research areas have been assigned:

- Management of the Smart Grid Infrastructure (among others, Automatic operability of the electric power grid and heat network as well as cyber security and protection of metering data);
- Development of the Smart Grid Infrastructure (among others, Integration of scattered generation with the electric power grid and heat network, active monitoring and diagnosis of electric power grids);
- New Businesses based on Smart Infrastructure (among others, development of products and services on the basis of IoT, Cost-Effective Systems of energy storage).

The tasks contained in the portfolio focus on the improvement of reliability, security and quality of electricity and heat supplies through the development of modern technologies in the area of diagnosis, automation and digitisation of governance processes, as well as on the development of new services in the area of smart buildings, smart cities or services related to energy management.

Research and development projects associated with grid services, currently carried out in TAURON Group include, among others: MdM - The platform foe management of data derived from the advanced metering infrastructure, ZSDS - Integrated System of Grid Diagnosis or ESS - The system of uninterrupted supply of consumers in distribution grids.

On the other hand, the task of the ProMoc project is to develop solutions enabling introduction of the new service, namely, reducing of electricity demand. Owing to the project, it will be possible to generate benefits of effective capacity management for three market participants: a customer, the energy company purchasing electricity and the entity managing the security of the national power system.

Moreover, within this portfolio, two projects are also carried out, for which TAURON group received financing under the Horizon 2020 Programme, among others, ICP4life assuming the creation of the integrated cooperation platform for designing, development and provision of “services” to companies, in particular those representing the SME sector and Utilitiee aiming at developing tools using the latest communication techniques allowing for involvement of consumers in activities fostering energy efficiency.