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.
