At this year's conference of Slovenian electrical engineers CIGRE-CIRED, which took place between 19 and 21 October in Laško, ELES also had its own exhibition space. They called it the "Crossroads of Competences and Innovation." They also prepared the program with examples of good practices and partnerships. At the talks also participated Bojan Černač from ARSO and Janko Kosmač from ELES, who presented an innovative weather station, and Renata Rubeša from HOPS and Emil Cek from ELES, who talked about the benefits of establishing a virtual cross-border control center.

Within the SINCRO.GRID project, ELES, in cooperation with the Environmental Agency of the Republic of Slovenia (ARSO), developed innovative weather stations that provided the SUMO system with weather data. Namely, the weather has a significant impact on the transmission capacity of transmission lines. Therefore, if we know what the weather is like along a transmission line, we can better use the existing infrastructure accordingly.

Renata and Emil emphasized that one of the project's main goals was to manage the tense conditions in the networks of Slovenia and Croatia. High voltages in the networks pose a significant challenge to the reliable operation and life of energy devices. To achieve this goal, the partners decided to install new compensation devices in their networks. Thus, the idea of ​​a virtual cross-border control center (VCBCC) was born with the aim of optimal use of reactive energy sources (both new compensation devices and conventional devices) and control of reactive energy flows between the Slovenian and Croatian networks. The best way to achieve this goal was to purchase a common flow optimization application on both networks. This application was named Voltage-Var Scheduler (VVS).