Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RENergetic (Community-empowered Sustainable Multi-Vector Energy Islands) Reporting period: 2022-05-01 to 2023-04-30 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project What is the problem/issue being addressed?RENergetic was born to demonstrate the viability of so-called ‘urban energy islands’. Energy islands seek to achieve the highest possible degree of self-sustainability with regards to the supply of its energy demand, be it electricity or heat through local renewable resources. At the same time an urban energy island may offer ancillary services to the public grid surrounding it. These islands place the consumer at the centre of the energy transition, giving them an active part in energy communities capable of producing their own energy, sharing the surplus with the rest of the public grid and optimizing consumption. RENergetic will demonstrate that Urban Energy Islands increase both the number of renewables in these areas and the energy efficiency of local energy systems. RENergetic will demonstrate the viability of this energy islands in three site pilots, each of them of a different nature: New Docks, a residential area in Ghent –Belgium, Warta University Campus in Poznan, Poland and San Raffaele Hospital and its investigation and research campus in Segrate-Milan, Italy. The impact of the Urban Energy Islands is assured as technical, socio-economic,and legal / regulatory aspects are considered while safeguarding economic viability. The objectives that RENergetic is pursuing are 4:Objective 1: To securely maximize the level of energy autarky of a local energy system (energy island) and its share of renewable energy sources at energy consumption, at the same time.Objective 2: To create energy island communities with formal underpinnings and a high level of personal identification that support a high intake of renewable energy sources in autarch energy islands.Objective 3: To enhance the economic attractiveness of renewable-based and autarch local energy systems (energy islands).Objective 4: To ensure a high replication potential of the RENergetic solution across Europe with a special focus on the opportunities offered by local energy island communities Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far RENergetic is a high-complexity-research project with a trans-disciplinary approach. It includes a social, a technical and an impact view. RENergetic is doing its research work in 3 trial sites, very different from one another: 1- Pilot site 1: Ghent – New Docks, Belgium.2- Pilot site 2: Poznan – Warta Campus, Poland.3- Pilot site 3: Segrate – Hospital and research campus, Italy.From the social point of view, the work carried out during the last 18 moths we made progress in all these areas. We generated literature analyses and identified motivators, needs and barriers in a series of interviews. We supported the pilots with pilot-specific context analyses and provided ideas how to better engage citizens for example with physical installations and digital communication tools, how to support heat demand response implementations and what possible interventions could be developed in the future. From the technical point of view, we gathered the requirements from the pilot sites and other work packages for the RENergetic technical system. Based on these requirements, modelling of the system in SGAM was started and the first version of ICT architecture was proposed. In order to simplify the development process and optimization algorithms design, WP3 followed an Agile methodology and created user stories to explain functionalities of the system. The main functions of the system were divided into the epics – a collection of user stories related to specific part of the system. The development team was organized to perform the development of the system; the FOG (Forecasting Group) was organized in order to discuss AI-based algorithms and models and their integration to the system. To map high level and abstract user stories to more technical requirements and descriptions the two new roles were introduced. The Epic owner is responsible for working on the concept of the vision, its functionalities, mock-ups for user interface and organizing a discussion with the pilots to understand their requirements. The Product owner maintains the global vision of the system, gathers revised user stories from epic owners, pass them to the dev team, and answer their questions.From the impact point of view, the work is carried out on three different fronts in parallel. First, we have the common evaluation of the impact of the actions performed in the three pilot sites. Therefore, at the beginning of the project the KPIs and related metrics for this joint evaluation have been defined, and they will be used later once the evaluation results of the individual pilots are available. Second, by defining a methodological framework that provides a clear picture of needs, requirements, and legislative framework of energy islands, RENergetic is setting the foundation for effective communication of lessons learnt, exploitation and deployment of results into the market. This context assessment will inform the technical development and the definition of the real business cases for the demonstration cases. And third, RENergetic will provide all the tools and support for ensuring great market impacts of the exploitable results developed in the social and technical developments, and demonstrated in the three pilot sites. Having a clear picture of the market conditions and expectations will greatly favour the definition and set-in-motion of effective commercialisation and replication plans based on solid business models and business plans. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) These are the impacts that RENergetic is aimed to achieved:Impact 1: Validate solutions for decarbonisation of the local energy system while ensuring a positive impact on the wider energy infrastructure, on the local economy and local social aspects, and local air quality.Impact 2: Enhance the involvement of local energy consumers and producers, preferably by creating energy communities in the development and the operation of local energy systems and test new business models.Impact 3: Validate approaches, strategies, and tools to safely and securely operate an integrated local energy system across energy vectors (electricity, heating, cooling, water, wastes, etc.) so that it is able to integrate higher shares of renewables (than it would in case of separate operation of infrastructures)Impact 4: Benchmark technical solutions and business models that can be replicated in many local regions and that are acceptable by local citizens.Impact 5: Achieve an overall increased quality of life of affected citizens, while reducing their CO2 footprint, through energy island communities.Impact 6: The RENergetic solutions provide a ‘living system’ in so far as it is enabled to continuously advance the technical and socio-economic infrastructure and optimization through built-in adaptation options. renergetic-logo.png
