Brussels, 07/05/2010 (Agence Europe) - Over a year after it was set up in February 2009, the reliability of the Coreso Centre in providing early warning of major disruptions to electricity supplies in the centre-west of Europe is clear. Coreso is based in Brussels. It was set up to increase the security of electricity supplies in Europe by providing continuous security assessments of a number of countries' electricity grids, comprising the technical and coordination centres of the French electricity grid RTE, Belgian grid ELIA and the National Grid in the UK. It has significantly increased the inter-grid operational capacity of electricity transport in centre-west Europe (in others words, Germany, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) in response to new integration challenges for electricity grids arising from renewable energy and the increase in international sales of electricity within the EU. Three times since it was set up, Coreso has detected problems that would not have been discovered without wide-scale monitoring well beyond the scope of a single country. If the three supply hiccoughs had not been resolved, total electricity blackouts would have occurred. Following its analysis of supply problems in the centre-west of Europe, Coreso came up with coordinated corrective action which was implemented by the transport networks in question and was more effective at resolving the problems than action that any of the grids came up with on their own. This is encouraging ELIA, RTE and the National Grid to extend their cooperation to incorporate further European electricity grid operators. (E.H.trans fl)