Energy communities benefit from flexibility In the middle of the climate crisis, a new digital tool is going to curb energy waste. Digital Economy Energy © petovarga/Shutterstock.com With climate change visibly affecting our societies and the prices for heating, fuel and other daily conveniences soaring, the debate around energy is possibly the only one that matters right now. The EU’s energy demand has been growing in the past century, along with its population and well-being. The current energy crisis, however, requires a drastic economic change towards a more sustainable deployment of resources. The EU-funded FleXunity project was completed just in time to help businesses solve this conundrum. Optimise flexibility FleXunity's main objective was to develop and validate a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) digital tool based on advanced AI algorithms, remote automatisation and blockchain to optimise community energy flexibility, match consumers’ energy needs, and contribute to current energy security and climate challenges. A VPP can be seen as an aggregation of consumers and prosumers (smaller power plants) that are connected to each other via a cloud management platform that creates what’s known as a ‘smart grid’. It’s also sometimes referred to as an ’energy community’. Using real-time data Energy communities in Spain, Portugal and the UK provided the necessary data inputs to establish a reliable VPP framework. Validation tests then demonstrated the technical feasibility of the solution and that VPPs could be used as a reliable and helpful instrument to mitigate risks. “Results show that energy communities with a higher energy surplus using FleXunity technology are enabling more savings for community members,” says project coordinator Luísa Matos, who is also co-founder and CIO/CPO of Cleanwatts Holding Co. “Along with decentralisation, democratisation and decarbonisation, the digitalisation component is key for the energy transition,” she adds. Barriers to overcome According to researchers, the biggest challenges to developing a secure and flexible electricity market in the EU are linked to the penetration of renewables, energy costs for end-users, and the loss of value. Distributed energy resources mainly include small renewable energy source (RES) power plants that are not big enough to meet existing energy demands. However, when combined, they can behave as if they were a single power plant, adding new energy capacity and supply, while increasing overall grid stability and providing extra income for consumers and aggregators. This is where AI is helpful. “The combination of dispersed RES power plants, controllable loads and the AI algorithms can provide a more efficient use of the energy resources available, offering new business opportunities that can contribute to the minimisation of energy costs for end-users and facilitate grid operation,” says Matos. The FleXunity project developed different levels of novel business models which were evaluated using the data acquired from real-world implementations. The economic benefits for stakeholders were also quantified. Additional new revenue streams and energy savings could be achieved by different market stakeholders wherever adequate legal frameworks are established. For now, this is still a barrier to the proliferation of the energy communities and the VPP concept. “Several countries are taking the first steps in the transposition of the EU framework, but a further push should be made to accelerate market development, especially on the simplification of permitting processes for energy communities” concludes Matos. Keywords FleXunity, Cleanwatts, energy community, climate change, energy
