Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COMMUNITAS (Bound to accelerate the roll-out and expansion of Energy Communities and empower consumers as fully-fledged energy market players)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-01-01 bis 2023-12-31
With the new concepts of “Renewable Energy Communities” (RECs) and “Citizen Energy Communities” (CECs) introduced in the “Clean Energy for all Europeans” package (CEP), community energy projects were recognised and instrumentally brought forward, setting 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 need to be overcome, and progress needs to be made to clarify and streamline the concepts of REC and CEC, enabling their 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), 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, and needs into the core developments of the project.
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), 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, and needs into the core developments of the project.
In the initial year of the project, efforts were directed towards setting the stage for the development and demonstration of COMMUNITAS solutions. To take into consideration the needs and wishes of the citizens, the project started off with a set of locally organized workshops that promoted interaction with the target audience for COMMUNITAS solutions. This then resulted in the first draft of the, soon to be developed, COMMUNITAS Knowledge Base, a repository of all the information that a citizen might need to set up or join an Energy Community. A methodology was also developed for future citizen engagement activities, laying the groundwork for the Social and Policy Labs that will take place with the citizens living in the pilot areas.
At the same time, work was carried out to clearly define the architecture of the COMMUNITAS Core Platform and how the different components will interact with it. Thirteen technical use cases were defined, representing the different innovative solutions and allowing further clarification of the integration necessary between the solutions.
From an R&D perspective, it is important to highlight the analysis of results from the workshops with stakeholders, where 18 different insights were collected and reflect the main needs and concerns of different stakeholders relating to the topic of energy communities. These insights reflect several key areas, such as financing, regulatory, technical, or social. In combination with the value-based proposition design for citizen engagement and the methodology built for COMMUNITAS Social and Policy Labs, the consortium is planning to prepare an in-depth scientific article to share these outcomes with the scientific community. Furthermore, an analysis was carried out on emergent market roles and novel incentive schemes beyond the traditional models that effectively engage consumers. The analysis covered the state-of-the-art but also market roles and incentives that go beyond it.
At the same time, work was carried out to clearly define the architecture of the COMMUNITAS Core Platform and how the different components will interact with it. Thirteen technical use cases were defined, representing the different innovative solutions and allowing further clarification of the integration necessary between the solutions.
From an R&D perspective, it is important to highlight the analysis of results from the workshops with stakeholders, where 18 different insights were collected and reflect the main needs and concerns of different stakeholders relating to the topic of energy communities. These insights reflect several key areas, such as financing, regulatory, technical, or social. In combination with the value-based proposition design for citizen engagement and the methodology built for COMMUNITAS Social and Policy Labs, the consortium is planning to prepare an in-depth scientific article to share these outcomes with the scientific community. Furthermore, an analysis was carried out on emergent market roles and novel incentive schemes beyond the traditional models that effectively engage consumers. The analysis covered the state-of-the-art but also market roles and incentives that go beyond it.
The project has only finished its first year, so not many results or impacts have been achieved at the moment. The development of the solutions is at an early stage, and the demonstration has not started. The main results and impacts achieved so far are related to the research conducted in the first work package. First, the workshops that were held with the citizens provided insights that will support our research and development. At the same time, the value-based proposition design methodology is a result that will influence how the Social and Policy Labs are conducted in the future. The development of use cases and platform architecture are internal results, but they provide a base for the development of solutions. Finally, the emergent market roles and novel incentive schemes are research outputs that will also shape the solutions and be validated in the demonstration activities.