AI spreading in the energy sector is expected to dramatically reshape energy value chain in the next years, by improving business processes performance, while increasing environmental sustainability, strengthening social relationships and propagating high social value among citizens. However, uncertain business cases, fragmented regulations, standards immaturity and low-technical SMEs workforce skills barriers are actually hampering the full exploitation of AI along the energy value chain. I-NERGY will deliver: (i) Financing support through Open Calls to third parties SMEs for new energy use cases and technology building blocks validation, as well as for developing new AI-based energy services, while fully aligning to AI4EU service requirements and strengthening the SME competitiveness on AI for energy; (b) An open modular framework for supporting AI-on-Demand in the energy sector by capitalising on state-of-the-art AI, IoT, semantics, federated learning, analytics tools, which leverage on edge-level AI-based cross-sector multi-stakeholder sovereignty and regulatory preserving interoperable data handling. I-NERGY aims at evolving, scaling up and demonstrating innovative AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) Energy Analytics Applications and digital twins services that will be validated along 9 pilots, which: (a) Span over the full energy value chain, ranging from optimised management of grid and non-grid RES assets, improved efficiency and reliability of electricity networks operation, optimal risk assessment for energy efficiency investments planning, optimising local and virtual energy communities involvement in flexibility and green energy marketplaces; (b) Delivers other energy and non-energy services to realise synergies among energy commodities (district heating, buildings) and with non-energy sectors (i.e. e-mobility, personal safety/security, AAL), and with non- or low-technical domains end users (i.e. elderly people).

The focus of the project is to gain a better understanding in how to set up and roll out energy communities and energy efficiency services. The project builds on the knowledge and work within the EU Bridge initiative, ETIP SNET and others. In order to deliver this project successfully, the consortium includes a complementary group of experts on social science, policy and regulation, implementation, energy aggregation and energy service developers. The project focusses on 3 levels of Energy Communities: those existing at the start of the project and included in the work plan as such; those that will be initiated throughout the project and those not directly partnering in the project, but benefiting from the exchange and expertise of DECIDE. All together they provide a set of complementary and geographically well-spread cases: social housing, middle class and upper class neighbourhoods covering Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Estonia, Germany and France. All together these pilots will deliver the necessary cases for a sound outreach built on an extensive social science basis. The project will work on identifying which kind of individuals and groups need what kind of communication and interaction to be motivated to join; i.e. work on identifying stakeholder segmentation to reach maximum input by targeted actions and prioritization in stakeholder segments. Different methods will be tested and evaluated with the different identified groups, including techniques as intergenerational learning. The outreach is active: instead of a toolbox with reports, presentations, templates, ... we want you to learn HOW to reach impact and do that through webinars, workshops, interactive sessions at diverse conferences, ...

InterConnect envisages to contribute for the democratization of efficient energy management, through a flexible and interoperable ecosystem where demand side flexibility can be soundly integrated with effective benefits to end-users. In fact, over the last few years several projects and technology providers have come up with solutions that allow every energy user to have awareness and control over his appliances, but there has always been a major issue with interoperability. End-users should be able to choose and change their technology providers, without having to replace their installation, every time they feel this need and still be able to adopt sustainable behaviour and benefit from technological advances. In the energy sector, a steep move towards digital is occurring and becoming tremendously user-centric and market-driven. The system dimension is significant, as the number of energy service providers is increasing thanks to favourable regulatory environment and technology advancements for monitoring and control. This is the reason why this consortium integrates relevant partners from all the representative stakeholders in this new energy paradigm. Specific competences in ICT, IoT, energy, data science, software, were included and the full value chain, from R&D institutions, manufacturers, DSO, retailers, IT providers, and energy users is represented. To guarantee a higher Europe-wide impact, several relevant associations related with ICT and energy are also involved. To achieve a significant dimension, 7 large scale pilots, in different countries and with different end-users, are foreseen to guarantee representativeness and dimension in terms of number of appliances and services. The overarching objective of these pilots is to demonstrate a real digital market environment over electrical systems with significant amounts of DSF, reducing operational and investment costs that will benefit energy end-users and help EU achieve its energy efficiency objectives.

Traditional silo approaches, where stakeholders manage their own data, could be replaced by digital and smart buildings, merging heterogeneous data sources, and placing the stakeholders as the core of these buildings. DigiBUILD will catalyse this much-needed transformation by making use of high-quality data and next generation digital building services, supporting the deployment of EU-wide Framework for a Digital Building Logbook. An inclusive environment for multi-stakeholder knowledge exchange (based on European Bauhaus initiative) will be applied to co-design end-user-oriented services. DigiBUILD will provide an open, interoperable and cloud-based toolbox to transform current ‘silo’ buildings into digital, interoperable and smarter ones, based on consistent and reliable data, supporting better-informed decision-making for performance monitoring & assessment, planning of building infrastructure, policy making and de-risking investments. It will be built on top of existing platforms and common EU initiatives, towards an Energy Efficient Building Data Space, based on standard cloud-data platform frameworks (FIWARE) and Data Space initiatives (GAIA-X and IDSA). On top of this advanced data governance framework, we will create AI-based data analytics and Digital Building Twins based on high-quality data, aiming to facilitate transparency, trust, informed decision-making and information sharing within the built environment and construction sector, which will be deployed across 10 real-world conditions (TRL 8). DigiBUILD will contribute to the uptake of digital technologies in the building sector to better align the EU Member States’ long-term renovation strategies with the EPBD requirements on decarbonisation, and on a path towards a climate-neutral building stock by 2050.

Even if significant progress has been made towards the Twin Transition, the recent energy crisis revealed the EU energy systems vulnerability and dependence on external energy sources and highlighted the need for intensifying the integration of RES in electricity, transport and building (heating) sectors. To achieve on this, the energy system shall transform from a centralised/fossil-fuel-based to an energy efficient, RES-based and interdependent system, operating with a high degree of flexibility offered by distributed assets. ODEON is conceived under the principle that this can only be realized through the creation of an inclusive ecosystem of stakeholders characterized a mesh of Data, Intelligence, Service and Market flows, jointly enabling the resilient operation of the energy system under increased RES integration and distributed flexibility. ODEON introduces a sound, reliable, scalable and openly accessible federated technological framework (i.e. ODEON Cloud-Edge Data and Intelligence Service Platform and corresponding Federated Energy Data Spaces. AI Containers, Smart Data/AIOps orchestrators) for the delivery of a wealth of services addressing the complete life-cycle of Data/AIOps and their smart spawn in federated environments and infrastructures across the continuum. It will integrate highly reliable and secure federated data management, processing, sharing and intelligence services, enabling the energy value chain actors and 3rd parties to engage in data/intelligence sharing, towards the delivery of innovative data-driven and intelligence-powered energy services in accordance to the objectives set by the DoEAP. ODEON results will be extensively validated in 5 large-scale demonstration sites in Greece, Spain, France, Denmark and Ireland involving all required value chain actors, diverse assets, heterogeneous grid and market contexts, and multi-variate climatic and socio-economic characteristics to support its successful replication and market uptake.