In order to address the global challenges of energy security and climate change, there is a pressing need to accelerate energy transition by increasing renewable energy sources (RES) and shifting towards distributed energy systems. The European Commission targets 45% renewable energy into electricity sector by 2030 and new policies are setting forth new provisions on energy communities to empower them to participate in the market.
Transformation of electricity sector has however major challenges to ensure security of power supplies and to add more flexibility from demand side on the system to be able to integrate distributed renewable generation. Huge capacity wind farms or solar plants, but also domestic roof-top solar panels are simultaneously supplying power. In that sense, end-users of electricity are expected to become “prosumers”. But while this is a great opportunity to face increase in electrification and can reduce customer bills, it can create problems for traditional energy generators and grid operators because of renewables intermittency and volatility causing challenges in the power balance.
The big challenges to develop a secure and flexible electricity market in EU are (a) to maximize RES penetration while ensuring grid stability and lower balancing costs, (b) to reduce energy costs for end-users and facilitate self-generation, integrate storage and flexible load management, (c) and thus giving more opportunities to consumers to capture value from their consumption flexibility.
The FleXunity project addresses the current challenges of managing the variability in renewable generation by using storage and flexible loads and the challenge of enhancing customer empowerment by designing business models that facilitate their participation on markets.
The main objective of the FleXunity project was to develop and validate a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) digital tool based on advanced Artificial Intelligence, remote automatization and blockchain to optimize community energy flexibility, match consumer’s energy needs, ensure further development of RES, optimize distributed energy resources, and contribute to the current energy security and climate change challenges, while enhancing retailers and aggregators competitive advantage.
The FleXunity project successfully deployed two distinct large scale pilot Energy Communities (EC) in different countries, that gave the necessary data inputs to establish a reliable VPP framework able to perform the management and control of a wide diversity of energy assets, enabling their participation in the different Energy Markets. The data collected from the implemented pilots served as input for the evaluation of the developed VPP platform and the different Business Models developed. The VPP platform validation tests performed with the different energy assets deployed demonstrated the technical feasibility of the final solution and its compliance with the identified legal requirements and with the FleXunity project requirements.
