With its “Clean Energy for all Europeans” package (CEP), the European Commission formally recognised and instrumentally brought forward community energy projects, including definitions for “Renewable Energy Communities” (RECs) and for “Citizen Energy Communities” (CECs). The new concepts introduced in the CEP set the course for a more active role of EU citizens in the energy markets. To fully concretize the benefits envisioned by the CEP, a myriad of barriers needs to be overcome and progress needs to be done to clarify and streamline the concepts of REC and CEC, enabling its uptake by all interested citizens. Motivated by that challenge, COMMUNITAS will promote energy citizenship, enabling citizens to take control of their own path towards sustainability by becoming an active element of the energy markets. The project will deliver a Knowledge Base that will provide users with technical, administrative, and legal information on ECs, streamlining the creation and expansion of this concept. COMMUNITAS will also deliver an innovative set of tools - capitalizing on technologies such as IoT, Blockchain and Cloud Computing - to unlock citizens’ active participation in energy markets and communities (all integrated into an open, digital “one-stop-shop” COMMUNITAS Core Platform (CCP)), allowing EC members to have an aggregated position in the energy markets or explore ancillary services using different energy assets or load profiles of the community. As a project that aims to position citizens in the centre of energy markets, COMMUNITAS has citizens at the centre of its own approach: citizens will be involved in Social and Policy Labs throughout the whole project, in order to frequently factor in their feedback, wishes, needs into the core developments of the project.

With the technological development and the increasing integration of RES, storage of various energy vectors supported by new organisational measures and business models is used to foster the development of local energy systems and to boost the use of local energy sources. COMPILE project aims to activate and use Local Energy Systems in order to support the fast growth of energy production from RES in constrained networks, and foster the transition from centralized system with passive users into a flexible network of active users featuring energy communities. This transformation aims to enhance RES integration and increase the security of supply, without traditional network reinforcement. COMPILE is uniting the efforts of DSOs, market actors and the communities of active consumers, since increasing decentralization needs more consumer engagement and participation. The project aims to better understand the way emerging decentralized solutions and the existing centralized infrastructure operate together in an economically efficient way. In COMPILE, we focus on showing the benefit of cooperation through energy communities that will solve current grid problems in a coordinated way, avoiding the costly network reinforcement while leading to an increased RES share. The demo cases in COMPILE are positioned along the spectrum of this passive-/active consumer transition and will show different approaches to coordination of consumers, technology and business models. The demos will have different “starting point”: different countries, different technology, organizational levels, community sizes, composition (industry/houses/retail), and regulatory perspective. All COMPILE demos feature a high replicability potential. Our vision is an interplay of flexible energy community-supported networks with current centralized system, increasing societal benefit with optimized planning. This leads to a more economical use of resources, help local businesses and decarbonise local areas.

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.

TwinERGY will introduce a first-of-a-kind Digital Twin framework that will incorporate the required intelligence for optimizing demand response at the local level without compromising the well-being of consumers and their daily schedules and operations. The main idea behind the conception of the TwinERGY project lies on the interest of the project partners to exploit the new business opportunities that project implementation delivers and increase the relevance of the DR optimization tools and strategies in the new generation of energy management systems. By coupling mature practice for citizen engagement with service innovation through the lenses of public value, TwinERGY will ensure that a wide range of interests and especially of consumers/prosumers will be represented and supported in the energy marketplace. In this context, TwinERGY will develop, configure and integrate an innovative suite of tools, services and applications for consumers, enabling increase of awareness and knowledge about consumption patterns, energy behaviours, generation/ demand forecasts and increase of local intelligence via properly established Digital Twin-based Consumer-Centric Energy Management and Control Decision Support mechanisms that locally optimize demand response. Key use cases will be trialed across 4 pilot regions making use of cutting-edge methods and tools. Special focus is given on standardization and policy & market reform as key enablers for the successful commercialization of the TwinERGY results. Additional attention is given in establishing knowledge transfer and exchange synergies with similar projects listed under the BRIDGE Initiative, while explicit focus will be given on the establishment of close collaboration with the projects funded under the LC-SC3-ES-5-2018 topic, to further reinforce and catalyze collaborative advancements in research, innovation, regulatory and market issues around Demand Response, RES Integration and Consumer Engagement.