Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ELEXIA (Demonstration of a digitized energy system integration across sectors enhancing flexibility and resilience towards efficient, sustainable, cost-optimised, affordable, secure and stable energy supply)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-01-31
The ELEXIA project started in October 2022 and develops and upgrades validated tools for planning and managing integrated energy systems in different conditions. It integrates and combines energy systems across vectors and sectors towards a cost-optimised as well as flexible and resilient energy system of systems. A Digital Services Platform will host the energy management and planning services and will foster flexibility and sector coupling. A System Planning Toolbox is under development and will be deployed to support effective sector coupling at local sites considering different scenarios, operational details, possibly conflicting interests of multiple local actors, and security of supply. An Energy Management Systems is also under development and will be deployed for secure and efficient operation of sector coupled local sites including forecasting, digital twins, optimization, control, monitoring, assessing operating conditions, predicting anomalous operation, and preventing occurrence of breakdowns. ELEXIA will demonstrate the use of planning and operational tools in a one-stop-shop, modular and open, digital platform at TRL7–8. It will demonstrate the benefits of sector integration at local / national level in three different geographical, climate and economic conditions in Europe: in an industrial port environment in Portugal, in an urban-city hub environment in Denmark, and in an industrial-urban-residential environment in Norway. ELEXIA will assess environmental, economic and social sustainability, will deliver a methodology for CAPEX / OPEX and value creation, and focuses on policy and governance. It puts focus on stakeholder engagement and societal acceptance and ensures effort towards future exploitation and replication. ELEXIA establishes and will demonstrate realistic and concrete pathways to ultimately achieve independence of fossil fuels by harnessing the latent flexibility of the energy system through integration, data-intelligence, and planning, working towards the 2050 European goals.
During the first period (16 months) of the four-year project, the work performed and main achievements of ELEXIA were:
• Engineering requirements and use-cases of the three pilot sites identified to form a common ground for tool development and adaptation. Local stakeholders were involved, and level of acceptance was evaluated to identify area of improvement throughout the next phases of the project. Tool developers identified their needs and requirements and workshops together with the pilot owners were held to align the understanding of existing and future the infrastructure and technologies. It will also contribute to an efficient implementation and integration at the pilot sites which will start in year three of the project. First sets of KPIs were identified. However, results and boundary conditions might be adjusted in case it might turn to be necessary during the project.
• The development of the digitalization platform, the energy management and system planning tools was started. The first Open-source European Digital Services Platform is soon ready for testing while demons of the data broker and data lake API were already demonstrated to project members, in parallel to the progressing development of smart gateway features. The development and adaptation of the energy management and system planning tools is proceeding using already collected operational data of the use cases. Main focus was towards flexibility functions which are suggested as MIMs (Minimum Interoperability Mechanisms) for integrated energy systems. The energy systems modelling is ahead of schedule and progressing well. These tool development and adaptation activities are tightly connected with the pilot sites and the abovementioned engineering requirements and boundary conditions. Regular web-meetings supported a continuous exchange of information among all partners involved. Next activities will be a first testing of Integration services and offline validation of the integrated workflow
• Work on sustainability assessment and policy started, with input from the use cases. These include the LCA analysis of the use cases beginning with the pilot in Portugal and being then also applied to the other pilot sites. The economic assessment and societal impact assessment is in progress with the latter by expanding the ELEXIA concept beyond the boundaries of the pilots using the tool EnergyPlan. Also, non-energy costs, market integration and governance will be evaluated. For this was s framework developed, visualized in a schematic and a first draft for a seminar paper was prepared. The process for analysing CO2 emissions was also shared with all project participants.
• Several communication and dissemination activities were initiated during RP1, including the development of the ELEXIA webpage, establishing the project presence on social media, and preparing communication materials. Additionally, numerous scientific publications were launched, with plans to be supplemented by public (non-scientific) ones. Success will be documented through facts and figures, to be presented in the initial technical review.
• Continued project and consortium management has prioritized ensuring the project runs seamlessly, with a high degree of collaborative effort. A detailed project management plan was developed to form a base for cooperation within the project.
• Engineering requirements and use-cases of the three pilot sites identified to form a common ground for tool development and adaptation. Local stakeholders were involved, and level of acceptance was evaluated to identify area of improvement throughout the next phases of the project. Tool developers identified their needs and requirements and workshops together with the pilot owners were held to align the understanding of existing and future the infrastructure and technologies. It will also contribute to an efficient implementation and integration at the pilot sites which will start in year three of the project. First sets of KPIs were identified. However, results and boundary conditions might be adjusted in case it might turn to be necessary during the project.
• The development of the digitalization platform, the energy management and system planning tools was started. The first Open-source European Digital Services Platform is soon ready for testing while demons of the data broker and data lake API were already demonstrated to project members, in parallel to the progressing development of smart gateway features. The development and adaptation of the energy management and system planning tools is proceeding using already collected operational data of the use cases. Main focus was towards flexibility functions which are suggested as MIMs (Minimum Interoperability Mechanisms) for integrated energy systems. The energy systems modelling is ahead of schedule and progressing well. These tool development and adaptation activities are tightly connected with the pilot sites and the abovementioned engineering requirements and boundary conditions. Regular web-meetings supported a continuous exchange of information among all partners involved. Next activities will be a first testing of Integration services and offline validation of the integrated workflow
• Work on sustainability assessment and policy started, with input from the use cases. These include the LCA analysis of the use cases beginning with the pilot in Portugal and being then also applied to the other pilot sites. The economic assessment and societal impact assessment is in progress with the latter by expanding the ELEXIA concept beyond the boundaries of the pilots using the tool EnergyPlan. Also, non-energy costs, market integration and governance will be evaluated. For this was s framework developed, visualized in a schematic and a first draft for a seminar paper was prepared. The process for analysing CO2 emissions was also shared with all project participants.
• Several communication and dissemination activities were initiated during RP1, including the development of the ELEXIA webpage, establishing the project presence on social media, and preparing communication materials. Additionally, numerous scientific publications were launched, with plans to be supplemented by public (non-scientific) ones. Success will be documented through facts and figures, to be presented in the initial technical review.
• Continued project and consortium management has prioritized ensuring the project runs seamlessly, with a high degree of collaborative effort. A detailed project management plan was developed to form a base for cooperation within the project.
Results beyond the state of the art were so far documented in some scientific publications and interest from participants at conferences as well as request for contacts from other ongoing project support the impression that the project and the results until now are beyond the state of the art. Already available papers are listed blow, others are currently in preparation.
• Mikkel L. Sørensen, Jan K. Møller, Henrik Madsen, Reconciling temporal hierarchies of wind power production with forecast-dependent variance structures. Eur. Math. Soc. Mag. 130 (2023), pp. 4–13
• Schledorn, Amos and Charousset-Brignol, Sandrine and Junker, Rune Grønborg and Guericke, Daniela and Madsen, Henrik and Dominković, Dominik Franjo, Frigg 2.0: Integrating Price-Based Demand Response into Large-Scale Energy System Analysis. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4617554 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4617554
• Hjörleifur G. Bergssteinsson, Mikkel L. Sørensen, Jan K. Møller, Henrik Madsen, Heat load forecasting using adaptive spatial heirarchies. Applied Energy Volume 350, Novemeber 2023,
• Mikkel L. Sørensen, Jan K. Møller, Henrik Madsen, Reconciling temporal hierarchies of wind power production with forecast-dependent variance structures. Eur. Math. Soc. Mag. 130 (2023), pp. 4–13
• Schledorn, Amos and Charousset-Brignol, Sandrine and Junker, Rune Grønborg and Guericke, Daniela and Madsen, Henrik and Dominković, Dominik Franjo, Frigg 2.0: Integrating Price-Based Demand Response into Large-Scale Energy System Analysis. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4617554 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4617554
• Hjörleifur G. Bergssteinsson, Mikkel L. Sørensen, Jan K. Møller, Henrik Madsen, Heat load forecasting using adaptive spatial heirarchies. Applied Energy Volume 350, Novemeber 2023,