The increasing trend for larger penetration of intermittent RESs at grid edge for increasing electricity system decarbonisation has posing an increasing need for flexibility to better balance supply and demand. DR represents a viable option for providing larger share of flexibility through the control of electricity consumption within end customer premises. Achieving significant impacts of load flexibility schemes will however require new customer engagement strategies involving for example energy cooperatives, peer-to-peer trading and citizen energy communities.
BRIGHT realize a multi-timescale DR strategy that works from a day-ahead scheduling up to near real-time adaptive control and allows individual assets to simultaneously provide power balancing service, grid congestion management, and economic benefits to participating stakeholders. From the society point of view a novel community-centred social, technological and business ecosystem is envisioned comprising : i) social science user experience design for end user behaviour understanding and community-level beyond economic incentive; ii) consumer and community digital twins modelling both consumer behaviour and flexibility assets to enable centralized virtual power plants (VPP) governance; iii) Blockchain and smart contracts technology enablers to implement peer-to-peer (P2P) trading/sharing mechanisms for supporting decentralized P2P VPP where self-organizing prosumers may exchange reciprocally information and spontaneously aggregate within dynamic coalitions, while taking explicit control of their flexibility assets, hence better trading off their preferences against grid stakeholders’ requirements; iv) cross-domain value stacking service design and innovative business modelling. In this context Consumers engagement is seen as one of the effective tools to unlock DR potential, and LEC (collectives) are considered as one of the effective means towards active consumer engagement. The key is to ensure that the consumers/prosumers/local communities take the front seat and co-create innovations that enable citizens/communities to play an active role in enacting DR mechanisms that are aligned with their values and expectations (e.g. comfort, well-being, prices, and other values).
The objectives encompass: the design novel attractive consumer-centred multi-value hybrid energy services; Understand energy consumer behaviour; Upscale DR technologies optimal programs design; Develop data-driven algorithms for cross sector optimal energy management ; Deploy a decentralized DR, P2P energy trading, and blockchain enabled VPP governance; Upscale the hybrid edge cloud data-driven metering infrastructure ; Deploy and validate the BRIGHT environments including innovative open cooperative sharing-economy local business models; Produce best practices blueprints and guidelines.
