EU-DREAM brings together a group of preeminent energy industry and research partners focused on accelerating innovation in digital tools and promoting the effective uptake of digital services. EU-DREAM is aligned with the EU Action Plan on the Digitalisation of the Energy System as it proposes to develop the next generation of energy services, solutions and products that really work for energy consumers, fully tested and demonstrated in 6 LLs in 6 EU countries (Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Denmark). EU-DREAM will address the barriers, motivations, and drivers from the consumer’s perspective, intertwining the new technological developments with SSH expertise. All EU-DREAM technical solutions will produce high-level TRL 6-7 results by the end of the project.

The unstoppable proliferation of novel computing and sensing device technologies, and the ever-growing demand for data-intensive applications in the edge and cloud, are driving a paradigm shift in computing around dynamic, intelligent and yet seamless interconnection of IoT, edge and cloud resources, in one single computing system to form a continuum. Many research initiatives have focused on deploying a sort of management plane intended to properly manage the continuum. Simultaneously, several solutions exist aimed at managing edge and cloud systems through not suitably addressing the whole continuum challenges though. The next step is, with no doubt, the design of an extended, open, secure, trustable, adaptable, technology agnostic and much more complete management strategy, covering the full continuum, i.e. IoT-to-edge-to-cloud, with a clear focus on the network connecting the whole stack, leveraging off-the-shell technologies (e.g., AI, data, etc.), but also open to accommodate novel services as technology progress goes on. The ICOS project aims at covering the set of challenges coming up when addressing this continuum paradigm, proposing an approach embedding a well-defined set of functionalities, ending up in the definition of an IoT2cloud Operating System (ICOS). Indeed, the main objective of the project ICOS is to design, develop and validate a meta operating system for a continuum, by addressing the challenges of: i) devices volatility and heterogeneity, continuum infrastructure virtualization and diverse network connectivity; ii) optimized and scalable service execution and performance, as well as resources consumptions, including power consumption; iii) guaranteed trust, security and privacy, and; iv) reduction of integration costs and effective mitigation of cloud provider lock-in effects, in a data-driven system built upon the principles of openness, adaptability, data sharing and a future edge market scenario for services and data.

RealValue aims to demonstrate how local small-scale energy storage, optimised with advanced ICT, could bring benefits to market participants throughout the EU. Smart Electric Thermal Storage (SETS) will be deployed in physical demonstration trials in 1250 homes in Germany, Latvia and Ireland but the analysis will also consider other storage technologies and energy vectors, including integration with district heating and micro-generation. SETS is a direct replacement for existing electric thermal storage heaters and water tanks with a combined load of 55GW across the EU. It can also replace direct electric resistance heaters with further connected load of 93GW. To validate the physical demonstrations at large scale RealValue will use modelling & virtual simulation to demonstrate the technical and commercial potential in millions of homes across representative EU regions. Thorough research studies are an integral part of RealValue and will include techno-economic and behavioural analysis that will be used to inform EU regulation and policy decision makers. RealValue will develop business models which quantify the potential of small-scale storage as an aggregated controllable load. It will provide system services or release value through price arbitrage within existing energy market structures, and highlight any barriers associated with integration into the electricity grid. The RealValue consortium is a truly cohesive partnership which has full participation and commitment from the whole energy supply chain. The consortium includes: technology developers (Glen Dimplex, Intel); energy system modelling specialists (UCD, DIW, RTU); energy market specialists (VTT); socio-economic experts (Oxford University); electricity network operators (ESBN, EirGrid) and energy utilities (MVV, SSE). RealValue is designed to accelerate innovation and develop business models necessary for small-scale storage, allowing it to form an integral part of the future EU energy landscape.