AI-EFFECT will establish a European Testing Experimentation Facility (TEF) for developing, testing, and validating AI applications in the energy sector. It will be distributed across nodes, virtually connecting existing European facilities. The solution includes a digital platform leveraging European building blocks for interoperability, flexibility, and scalability. AI-EFFECT aims to be a central hub for testing energy sector AI algorithms, fostering collaboration across utilities, industry, academia, and regulatory authorities. Resilience is ensured through a decentralized design, aligning with the EU Energy Data Spaces framework. The project involves developing 4 use cases/nodes addressing key energy challenges, focusing on district heating, transmission congestion management, DERs integration, and energy communities. The framework involves utilities proposing challenges, vendors developing algorithms, and researchers contributing solutions. Each use case has evaluation criteria, baselines, and benchmarks. AI certification procedures, including interpretability and verification, will be implemented, and the evaluation process will be automated. Benchmarks and certifications are publicly available, encouraging open-source contributions. The project breaks sector barriers, leveraging existing infrastructures and technologies for cross-sectoral collaboration. The platform enforces policies for data quality, integrity, and privacy, promoting controlled data sharing and collaboration. Secure APIs ensure controlled interactions, including risk and security assessments. The consortium explores certification, standardization, and quality requirements in line with the EU AI Act. Governance and business models for the enduring AI-EFFECT will be examined, considering the EU AI Act. The consortium aims to make AI-EFFECT a sustained business beyond initial funding, seeking input from members, other TEFs, and regulatory authorities for the preferred model.

The “RE-EMPOWERED” project aims to develop and demonstrate novel tools to provide a complete solution for all stages of a Microgrid/Energy Island and Multi-Microgrid applications. The tools include energy planning ranging from the design of Microgrids from scratch to the upgrade of existing installation to high RES systems. Planning will be guided by decision making about the generation size and other infrastructure parameters, based on economical and reliability criteria. Advanced Energy Management tools and solutions, building on existing proven technologies developed within other EU projects, will be further developed to achieve optimal operation of larger and smaller energy systems considering Demand Side Management (DSM) capabilities. In addition, management tools will exploit synergies with other available energy carriers, including electricity, heating, cooling, water, waste, e-mobility, etc. taking into account availability, operational, security, and reserve constraints. These will be demonstrated to leverage on the advantages load management offers, like greater flexibility and more efficient use of energy infrastructure and resources. From the citizen perspective, this entails the cultivation of higher efficiency mentality and self-sufficiency by an autonomous energy supply culture, when relevant. Concrete actions will be taken for customer driven approaches, supported by dynamic pricing, the establishment of local energy communities and local community training. A specialized tool will be developed and demonstrated to support active involvement of citizens in their own energy generation and management. Moreover dedicated converters, electric vehicles and resilient infrastructures will be developed. All the above-mentioned tools and solutions will be demonstrated in four demo sites with weak or non-existing grid, two in Europe, (Denmark and Greece), and two in India.

VPP4Islands aims to facilitate the integration of renewable systems, accelerate the transition towards smart and green energy and help Islands to exploit energy efficiency potential and innovative storage approaches, foster the active participation of citizens and become self-sufficient in energy, while reducing costs, GHG emissions and reliance on heavy fuel oil to generate power, and creating new intelligent business, growth and local skilled jobs. To reach these goals, VPP4Islands project proposes disruptive solutions based on digital twin concept, Virtual energy storage systems (VESS) and Distributed Ledger technology (DLT) to revolutionize the existing VPP and build smart energy communities. Based on aggregation and smart management of distributed energy resources (DERs), VPP4Islands increases the flexibility and profitability of energy systems while providing novel services. VPP4Island will also enhance the Demand Response Capability of consumers by understating their behaviors and promoting self-consumption. In order to validate and evaluate the proposed solutions, two use cases in real-life with diverse assets in two leading islands are planned. The control and optimization of different systems will be extended to consider not only electrical, but also multi-energy vectors. Moreover, the qualified VPP4Islands solutions will be replicated in 3 follower islands, in order to generate and initiate smart sustainable energy plans. Also, VPP4Islands will generate durable social and environmental values for the benefit of consumers/prosumers. Finally, VPP4Islands project consortium is composed of 1 large company, 1 DSO, 7 SMEs, 3 universities, 2 RTOs, 3 islands municipalities, and 2 non-profits organisation.