ASSIST is a 38 month European ‘market activation - policy orientation’ project to tackle fuel poverty and support vulnerable consumers. It answers the call requirements to actively engage consumers in the energy market and positively change behaviour in relation to energy consumption and to influence design of policy at all levels to tackle fuel poverty issues. Based on the conclusion of the “Energy Citizens’ Forum”, it combines activities that address both energy and social issues as fuel poverty is not only an energy issue nor can it be tackled in isolation of the bigger issue of poverty, it will: Broaden understanding on European fuel poverty incidence and how energy support services are effectively tackling the issue, identify best practice and needs but also provide a baseline against which the activity can be compared to demonstrate its effectiveness and to inform work towards policy orientation. Create an European network and build this by ensuring quality knowledge and skills of the Vulnerable Consumer Energy Advisors (VCEA) with a supportive infrastructure for professional development and experiencing sharing. The VCEA will be in positions of direct contact with the target group in order to help mainstream energy services and, increase access and uptake for the fuel poor. The creation of the VCEA network will also encompass the recruitment of persons with direct experience of vulnerability/fuel poverty, training them to increase their employability skills but, moreover, to maximise on the peer to peer benefits that they can offer in provision of advice . With specialist VCEA and advisory strategic steering committees each nation will undertake target actions to address the specific issue. In this way the action utilises the powerful effect of target group ownership of action + bespoke solutions designed in collaboration with the target groups/end users to deliver important lessons learned for dissemination and policy influence.

eCREW coordinates and supports the roll-out of an innovative scheme of household cooperation in energy management. These are Community Renewable Energy Webs (CREWs), in which households jointly exploit household-level electricity generation and battery storage capacities and optimise energy efficiency and expenditures. The key purpose of CREWs is to support the transition of passive consumers to active participants in the local energy system through informed decisions and collective actions. In eCREW, three energy companies from DE, TR and ES (Lighthouse Communities) will roll-out the eCREW approach to their clients. A strong and divers Follower Community made up of entities from AT, DE, ES, FR, GR, SE and TR is made fit for giving the eCREW approach a “Go”, too. Together, 240,000 households will be enabled to join a CREW during the project runtime, establishing about 200 CREWs with 15,000 participants, saving at least 13 GWh/year. Cooperation within a CREW is facilitated through the provision of an award-winning smart phone app (PEAKapp), exploiting smart meter data to stimulate an increase in energy efficiency and the uptake of local renewable electricity generation. Administration of the CREWs, including the billing of consumption and generation, is covered by electricity retailing companies which are thereby transformed into holistic service providers; we call them Community Administering Entities (CAEs). In our approach, administrative burdens are relieved from the households, who are then free to focus their efforts on making the most out of their participation in a CREW. Monetary benefits from the eCREW approach are distributed amongst prosumers, traditional consumers, and the CAE through an innovative split-incentives contract applied in the project. The financial arrangement is tailored to ensure that the eCREW approach is financially viable and attractive for all participants and allows a non-discriminatory participation of all households.

NOBEL GRID will develop, deploy and evaluate advanced tools and ICT services for energy DSOs cooperatives and medium-size retailers, enabling active consumers involvement –i.e. new demand response schemas – and flexibility of the market – i.e. new business models for aggregators and ESCOs. Through the dual-use of telecommunication networks, and validating the integration of renewable generation presence and demand response systems, NOBEL GRID will offer advanced services to all actors in the retail markets of the electricity system in order to ensure that all consumers will benefit from cheaper prices, more secure and stable grids and low carbon electricity supply. The project results will be demonstrated and validated in real world environments with active involvement of all the actors, and based on the new business models defined during the project.

The main aim of NRG2peers is to support the uptake of a next generation of European peer-to-peer Energy Communities. NRG2peers sets up a gamified platform in three levels, supporting residential energy communities to increase energy efficiency and to integrate a higher share of renewable energy. The NRG2peers platform aims to support the uptake and multiplication of attractive, financially, legally and technically viable, user-centred residential energy communities in three concrete ways: Level 1: Collecting experiences from operative peer-to-peer energy communities, whose assessment schemes are already compliant with national and EU legislations, in a way to deliver Readiness Level Framework Indicators (Organisational, Institutional, Market, Technological, Social) which helps to assess a communities’ readiness to become a peer-to-peer, peer-to-community and peer-to-market (P2P, P2C, P2M) energy community, to incite investments from the public and private sector at the local level, and to support decision making and policy at the MS and EU level to ensure a prosumer-friendly environment; Level 2: Providing smart demand-response mechanisms to optimize energy consumption and peak demand at the community level. The NRG2peers platform will adopt peer-to-peer privacy-aware learning mechanisms to ensure energy optimisation whereby three main aims are 1) Financial savings for the residential customers at community level 2) CO2 and environmental savings at the community level, and 3) Local self-reliance in terms of energy; Level 3: Adopting community-based nudging mechanisms for peer-to-peer transaction of renewable energy and motivating the maximal implementation and consumption of (local) RES production and consumption. By combining 3 levels with gamified features supporting peer-to-peer behavioural-based incentives, the NRG2peers platform targets for global energy and CO2 emission savings at the community level, and investment triggered in sustainable energy in EU.

SENDER will develop the next generation of energy service applications for demand-response, home-automation, -convenience and -security. It puts consumers at the heart of the energy market by engaging them in a co-creation process with other actors from the energy domain during the specification of pro-active DR mechanisms to cater for the consumers’ long-term incentivization. Grid operators are the 2nd group of SENDER core beneficiaries. The project results will increase the efficiency/hosting capacity of distribution networks by improving the quality of load forecasts and providing access to load flexibility, which will allow to improve frequency stability, congestion management and increased RES integration. In addition, monetarization on the flexibility potential will be provided by the participation in balancing/regulatory power markets. SENDER shifts DR from a reactive to a pro-active approach. Consumer data will be collected and processed by means of sensor data from its premises in a cyber-secure way to identify typical consumption patterns, mirror them by digital twins (DT) based on artificial intelligence technologies and aggregate the DTs supply/demand characteristics. The clustering of the consumer DTs will be conducted based on societal science approaches at three demonstration sites. Allowing interoperability with legacy systems and third-party applications, SENDER envisions business models (BM) that base on the condition that the consumer receives a fair share of the DSOs profit from flexibility use. BMs will focus on the role of the DSO as a facilitator, but also on energy communities/cooperatives as local actors that will manage their members´ flexibility assets. Based on the co-creation process, consumers will also be actively involved into the BM design. The SENDER wider roll-out after the project will be prepared by exploitation plans and implementation guides for the co-creation process and the SENDER soft- and hardware.