Finally, the project is already achieving some progress beyond the state of the art in several fronts. First, the methodology defined to cluster smart metre data is able to assess the weekly and yearly seasonalities of the behaviours when so far only the daily seasonality patterns was assessed. This improvement in the methodology allowed us to assess the typical differences between European households and as well as to define innovative methods to assess the impact in the population of the recent lockdowns due to the COVID crisis. Preliminary results have been presented so far on these points but more comprehensive results will be produced in the next month. Several stakeholders could exploit this result. On the one hand, it could lead to improved building codes and other standards. Moreover, engineers could use these typical load profiles to create more realistics energy consumption simulations when sizing, defining the control strategies or the business model of different infrastructures. Finally, it could lead to improved forecasting which will have a direct impact on the management of energy cooperatives / communities.
Moreover, while several psychological models explaining the reasons for investing in the energy transition have been produced in the past, all of them cover only one aspect and have assumed that all persons behave similarly. This is one of the first times that both issues are being tackled at the same time. Moreover, these results could have a large impact on the definition of policy interventions to foster the energy transition as they will allow designing tailored interventions to overcome barriers and foster drivers considering the heterogeneity of the population.
Finally, when the WHY toolkit is completed, solutions to the five use cases could be developed. By using these solutions, very different advances over the state of the art are planned to be carried out:
New sizing and controlling algorithm will be used in the Gniebing use case to optimise the answer of a microgrid towards blackouts.
An assessment of the real technical, economic and social impact that time of use tariffs have. This could lead to a better definition of tariff schemes for Energy Cooperatives, DSOs or regulators.
Tools to ease the definition, creation and management of energy communities.
Integrate different aspects of the energy transition in ESM and simulation models to allow more holistics projections of the actual and future residential behaviour.
In summary, these improvements would lead to an improved evidence-based policy-making on the energy challenges ahead (climate crisis, energy sovereignty and decarbonization of the economy).
