This Activity Report provides an overview of cutting-edge advances in the smart grid and DER domain from over 30 member institutes. Furthermore presented in the report is a selection of EU-funded and national research efforts towards increased share of DER. Among these projects is INTERPLAN, developing an integrated network operation planning tool, consisting of a set of tools for the operation planning of the Pan-European network, and addressing a significant number of system operation planning challenges of the current and the future 2030+ EU power grid, from the perspective of the transmission system, the distribution system, and with a particular focus on the transmission-distribution interface.