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Smart Building Ecosystem for Energy Communities

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - REScoopVPP (Smart Building Ecosystem for Energy Communities)

Reporting period: 2021-12-01 to 2023-11-30

By 2050, 98 million Europeans could become prosumers by joining an energy community. The REScoopVPP project has gathered front-runner energy communities to create the most advanced community-driven smart building ecosystem for energy communities. The ecosystem consists of a Community-driven Flexibility Box (COFYbox) acting as smart home controller, and a set of community tools (COFYcloud) to support energy services by the community.
The COFYbox is the first truly open and collaborative building controller, based on existing open-source home automation technology with more than 2500+ integrations. A COFYbox is affordable and available for everyone to use. Community tools enable energy communities to become real-time asset operators by employing demand and production forecasting algorithms, a dynamic pricing module for automated price-based control and an OpenADR-based explicit demand-response solution to force control in case the grid needs support.
The REScoopVPP solutions underwent a large-scale experimentation in Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, and the UK. The project improved electric vehicle, photovoltaic and electric battery control, and focused also on the intelligent integration of thermal storage and heat pump based (hybrid) heating solutions, capable of shifting fossil fuel consumption from legacy domestic hot water and heating equipment to flexible renewable heat. Further attention was given to smart plug control and the integration of equipment based on emerging EU-standards. The goal of the technology is to improve comfort, while not adversely affecting original functionalities, quality, and lifetime of the equipment.
To make sure that the ecosystem is viable, REScoopVPP put in place different European collaborations (online platform, cooperative working groups and new initiatives) to bring solutions to the market and provide citizens with a European, community-driven alternative.
In the first months of the project, the foundations for business and product development were created which included a legal and regulatory analysis with special focus on the new Clean Energy Package, a business analysis in which the pilot partners defined collaboratively the 12 most relevant business models, a technical State-of-the-Art analysis, definition of 9 Use Cases, overall system architecture, the definition of 29 Key Performance Indicators and a pilot site formal analysis. After these foundations, we focused to bring these foundations to life in evolved prototypes tested in live pilot situations leading to products with an improved TRL.
The technological developments focused in three core divisions: the integrations with the local hardware, the smart home controller itself and the different cloud solutions to support communities.
The integration works goal was to integrate as much as legacy equipment as possible, control them and open the flexibility potential of long and short lifecycle assets, PV panels, battery storage and EV chargers. In total, 208 families and 6 SMEs were involved in the different pilot sites where our technicians connected the local hardware. In some cases, solutions were unsuccessful, or alternatives had to be worked out when manufacturers blocked the access by changing their firmware during the project (e.g. Huawei inverters)
The COFYbox work focused on the continuous development and improvement of the integrated hardware and software architecture of the COFYbox. It also consisted in ensuring the technical deployment and management of the COFYboxes produced and distributed in the field. The software development further enabled the COFYcloud with personal cloudspace, dashboard and configuration options. It also focused on the necessary local and cloud control components, enabling flexibility.
The cloud work enabled us to advance at the community level with the development of energy demand and production forecasting tools, simulations on community flexibility, the price-based control stack for implicit demand response (DR), explicit DR technology for flexibility services and the COFYcloud management tools for communities, including dashboard.
All the hardware and software developed were tested in real life conditions in our 5 pilots around Europe.
We created specific technological facilitation by providing infrastructure support for the developments aiming at effectively managing the solutions, creating efficient and secure cloud resources, and ensuring scalability during replication of our solutions (preparing for commercial uptake).
Extensive work has been done to give the project public visibility through a consistent branding on our website, dissemination activities and pilot site communication. Exploitation and market uptake activities mapped market opportunities and sought direct implementation of our services. Finally, policy recommendations were issued targeting mostly energy sharing and flexibility services.
All in all, the project led to significant technological improvements, even surpassing some of targets set in the proposal with parts already in business operations at our partners.
The project advanced significantly on the largest open smart home environment in Europe for and by energy communities. The social impact we are realising is:
- Cheaper energy as we help community member in to optimise energy cost based on available cheap renewable energy;
- Privacy-by-design as our solution gives the end-user all control on the use, sharing and storage of private data;
- The COFYbox is an open ecosystem with collaborative developments and an open, vendor-agnostic approach so we can create communities without being locked into one vendor ecosystem;
- We believe a community, as an intermediate between the energy market and an end-user, can create more trust in the technological driven real-time energy world;
- A community can facilitate peer-to-peer trading, energy sharing, collective self-consumption, etc. in which the community again can create a more trustable environment for the end-user;
- A community has the potential to act on energy-poverty as they can lower the barrier for people in financially tough situations to join more advanced prosumer schemes.

The REScoopVPP project gave birth to set of products (i) COFYbox/ PowerShaper (ii) Community data (personal dashboard & community data); (iii) Forecasting for communities (ENDA); (iv) Virtual price matrix; (v) Powershaper OpenADR Flex. For each of these tools a set of initiatives has been taken to stimulate further developments, should it be at the product leader level (EnergieID, Enercoop or Carbon Co-op), with REScoopVPP partners or beyond the consortium, e.g. Energy Revolt in Luxemburg. The REScoopVPP exploitation work also involved the broader network of REScoop.eu members with an active Flexibility working group to enhance collaboration.
Lastly, we set further steps to create impact after the project and guarantee market uptake with a catalogue of open-source initiatives for energy communities (The REScode platform under code.rescoop.eu) tool-specific communication channels (Slack or Framateam) and a series of new project proposals to further develop or exploit the outcomes of the project (Horizon, LIFE and Interreg).
The partners are confident and committed to reach the impact goals set at the beginning and impact at least 375.000 customers in the next 5 years, with the different tools developed in our project.
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