Smart Community-Owned Renewable Energy Management

To achieve a more than 40% increase in renewable energy (RES) production by 2030, Northwestern Europe (NWE) must harness its untapped potential. However, as intermittent RES increases, regions such as East Netherlands (NL) and Flanders, Belgium (BE) will face challenges sooner, while areas like Brittany, France (FR), South Kerry, Ireland (IE), and Luxembourg (LU) will encounter them later. The primary issue is that energy consumption will not keep pace with the peaks in RES production, making it difficult for producers to utilize and sell their energy at cost-effective prices. This discrepancy impacts prices, causes congestion, creates market imbalances, and leads to the shutdown of solar and wind facilities, posing significant economic and ecological risks.

Energy Communities (ECs) present an opportunity for a just transition to a resilient, RES-based energy system. However, ECs must evolve from being mere energy producers to becoming collective energy managers. They need to scale up and professionalize, but despite growth and early trials, ECs in NWE face territorial challenges.

For instance, EPV in Brittany struggles with a lack of awareness and participation in its territory due to the prevalence of nuclear energy. SKDP in South Kerry encounters regulatory hurdles. EnergyRevolt in Luxembourg is dependent on international oil and gas markets, while ECOpower in Flanders, Endona, and ECL in East Netherlands lack resilience due to insufficient capabilities to organize and control collective devices, make informed market decisions, and provide grid services. Additionally, Energy Management Systems (EMS) for controlling EC assets are not off-the-shelf technologies, appliances are not plug-and-play ready, and the business case requires volume and market intelligence.

One way to increase critical mass is to grow in numbers, as seen in Flanders and Brittany, which have few but large ECs. In East Netherlands, where there are many smaller ECs, the best approach to gaining scale without losing community focus is aggregation into EC hubs.

SmartCORE aims to develop a new approach by adapting and combining existing methods and tools into a novel solution for NWE ECs who want to address their territorial challenges of limited awareness, reduced participation, lack of resilience & independence, by developing new capabilities and becoming integral community energy managers. To achieve that, we work with 6 existing ECs (2NL BE FR LU IE) who have experience, capacity and are ready to take this next step.

The social aspects of the solution include new EC capabilities for integral energy management activities, new forms of EC organisation into EC hubs (larger EC aggregations into decentralised networks), and tested business models. The technical aspects of SmartCORE build on current EMS architectures, enriched with new and enhanced algorithms, functionalities, users, services, forecasting tools, market couplings, user interfaces and communication protocols. Various combinations of the social and technical aspects are tested against identified territorial challenges using storage-supported (batteries) energy management activities of energy matching, sharing, grid balancing and congestion management.

To scale the experience and increase capabilities of 30 other ECs in NWE, we build on the existing Rescoop.eu and cVPP trainings to jointly deliver a new scheme incl. a tailored and a Buddy System parts, deliberately focused on the development of new capabilities.