Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HESTIA (Holistic dEmand response Services for European residenTIAl communities)
Reporting period: 2020-11-01 to 2022-04-30
HESTIA aims to provide a cost-effective solution for the next-generation DR services which will leverage the consumer engagement, energy and non-energy services, while dealing with both energy supply and demand side in a holistic manner. HESTIA intends to engage with residential consumers representing a still largely untapped sector, while enabling them to play an active role in flexibility sharing and grid balancing. HESTIA will enable residential DR services through: (i) exploitation of energy demand flexibility by engaging the consumers in demand side management activities, and (ii) valorization of energy efficiency in multi-carrier energy dispatching and optimal operation of building systems. HESTIA will exploit the consumer engagement as part of cooperative DR strategy at the community level, i.e. clusters of individual consumers and prosumers. To motivate the consumers to actively participate, HESTIA will leverage the financial, environmental and social drivers, while cross-fertilizing them to maximize the impact. HESTIA will involve the residents in the designing of the solutions through participatory codesign processes. HESTIA will create community engagement methodology and organizational tools with a high acceptance, that can be replicated and provide the corresponding tailored toolsets for a broader rollout. HESTIA will exploit the aggregated energy resource flexibility at the demand-side, in terms of cumulative energy consumption, distributed energy generation and storage, to better manage the disparity between energy demand, RES availability and grid requirements. User-personalized services will be delivered via a fully service-oriented, flexible ICT platform, underpinned by agent-based concepts, consumer digital twin and non-intrusive data analytics. This way, HESTIA will set the foundation for an open marketplace and a new grid reality, while steering consumer engagement according to the grid requirements and promoting RES and sustainable behavior.
With the goal to deliver tangible benefits along the energy value chain, HESTIA will cross-fertilize and bring together the community centric and grid-centric business models. In this way, HESTIA will demonstrate its potential to deliver 20-50% energy cost savings for the end consumers, depending on the level of engagement, and up to 20% of final consumption energy savings to be unlocked by multi-carrier energy dispatching and optimized operation of building systems. At the same time, HESTIA will bring benefits to grid stakeholders owing to the exploitation of demand-side flexibility, demonstrating at least 30% of total load as reschedulable (demand flexibility), owing to the consumer engagement in load shifting activities and improved self-consumption of locally produced and stored energy. This will further contribute to the RES uptake by reducing the payback period for capital investments in RES production and storage assets
With the goal to deliver tangible benefits along the energy value chain, HESTIA will cross-fertilize and bring together the community centric and grid-centric business models. In this way, HESTIA will demonstrate its potential to deliver 20-50% energy cost savings for the end consumers, depending on the level of engagement, and up to 20% of final consumption energy savings to be unlocked by multi-carrier energy dispatching and optimized operation of building systems. At the same time, HESTIA will bring benefits to grid stakeholders owing to the exploitation of demand-side flexibility, demonstrating at least 30% of total load as reschedulable (demand flexibility), owing to the consumer engagement in load shifting activities and improved self-consumption of locally produced and stored energy. This will further contribute to the RES uptake by reducing the payback period for capital investments in RES production and storage assets
HESTIA is implemented in 3 pilot sites (Pilot 1, Berchidda, ITALY; Pilot 2, Voorhout, THE NEDERLAND; Pilot 3, Palaiseau, FRANCE).
At project inception, a technical and regulatory analysis was conducted to identify and categorise the 3 pilot sites’ characteristics, assets and regulatory constraint (WP1). Consequentially, WP2 performed activities dedicated to the development of user-engagement strategies, and their practical realization, including participatory workshops run from September 2021 in both virtual and face-to-face modality (due to COVID restrictions) with the goal to explain the Hestia projects to pilot sites people and engage them in the project. Such phase led to conceive four services (WP3). Three services making up the Consumer Digital Twin span from the Human Behaviour Digital Twin service, (people) via the Energy Demand Forecasting & Production Modelling service (household) to the Consumer’s Energy Profiling service (clustering). The four service of Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring T3.4 supports all the above services. Alongside, WP4, started developing and implementing optimal Demand Response strategies drive by both Artificial Intelligence algorithms and human based interaction.
In WP5 were performed activities related to the deployment at pilot site levels of technologies and the integration of Hestia platform. The work mainly focused on the deployment activities which due to severe COVID restrictions (both in 2020 and 2021) eroded the forecasted time the activities would have needed. However, the 3 pilots are already in operation, delivering the baseline references, although with a different readiness and intensity.
Finally, HESTIA started focusing on the implementation of an open marketplace for Demand Response, with special regard on the verification of regulation and financial factors for the identification of the business logic on which the sharing marketplace will be built (WP6). This action is conduced along with the definition and management of HESTIA’s exploitable results: individual interviews with the exploitable results’ owners targeted at proposal stage, to understand the potential for exploitation of the different developed products/services from the project (WP7).
Across the first 18 months, HESTIA delivered a sounding communication strategy (social media, articles, website, initial pool of events), also in the frame of the BRIDGE initiative.
The project aims to develop more effective Demand Response mechanisms, leveraging on consumers engagement and behaviors. For achieving such major goal all the activities performed in the different WPs have been performed keeping an horizontal view and approach, trying to break the vertical silos (WP) and always aiming at identifying unique and homogenous solutions.
At project inception, a technical and regulatory analysis was conducted to identify and categorise the 3 pilot sites’ characteristics, assets and regulatory constraint (WP1). Consequentially, WP2 performed activities dedicated to the development of user-engagement strategies, and their practical realization, including participatory workshops run from September 2021 in both virtual and face-to-face modality (due to COVID restrictions) with the goal to explain the Hestia projects to pilot sites people and engage them in the project. Such phase led to conceive four services (WP3). Three services making up the Consumer Digital Twin span from the Human Behaviour Digital Twin service, (people) via the Energy Demand Forecasting & Production Modelling service (household) to the Consumer’s Energy Profiling service (clustering). The four service of Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring T3.4 supports all the above services. Alongside, WP4, started developing and implementing optimal Demand Response strategies drive by both Artificial Intelligence algorithms and human based interaction.
In WP5 were performed activities related to the deployment at pilot site levels of technologies and the integration of Hestia platform. The work mainly focused on the deployment activities which due to severe COVID restrictions (both in 2020 and 2021) eroded the forecasted time the activities would have needed. However, the 3 pilots are already in operation, delivering the baseline references, although with a different readiness and intensity.
Finally, HESTIA started focusing on the implementation of an open marketplace for Demand Response, with special regard on the verification of regulation and financial factors for the identification of the business logic on which the sharing marketplace will be built (WP6). This action is conduced along with the definition and management of HESTIA’s exploitable results: individual interviews with the exploitable results’ owners targeted at proposal stage, to understand the potential for exploitation of the different developed products/services from the project (WP7).
Across the first 18 months, HESTIA delivered a sounding communication strategy (social media, articles, website, initial pool of events), also in the frame of the BRIDGE initiative.
The project aims to develop more effective Demand Response mechanisms, leveraging on consumers engagement and behaviors. For achieving such major goal all the activities performed in the different WPs have been performed keeping an horizontal view and approach, trying to break the vertical silos (WP) and always aiming at identifying unique and homogenous solutions.
The project aims at delivering results in term of reduced energy consumption and reduced energy costs for the engaged householders. Such benefits will be delivered thanks to the ad hoc services developed by the project which are rooted in two main dimensions: the technical one and the social one. Technical dimension is represented by the ICT services of which the Hestia solution is composed, driven by Artificial Intelligence and ultimately proposed by the open flexibility marketplace build on blockchain. On the other hand the social component will play a crucial role in the development of the user interface through which these services will be displayed to the users and trigger their behaviors for enhancing demand response mechanisms. Such integration, of technical and social components will be able to strength the capacity of DR mechanisms, usually solely technically driven, for increasing their capacity and effectiveness in delivering value for its activator.