In the first months of the project, the foundations for business and product development were created which included a legal and regulatory analysis with special focus on the new Clean Energy Package, a business analysis in which the pilot partners defined collaboratively the 12 most relevant business models, a technical State-of-the-Art analysis, definition of 9 Use Cases, overall system architecture, the definition of 29 Key Performance Indicators and a pilot site formal analysis. After these foundations, we focused to bring these foundations to life in evolved prototypes tested in live pilot situations leading to products with an improved TRL.
The technological developments focused in three core divisions: the integrations with the local hardware, the smart home controller itself and the different cloud solutions to support communities.
The integration works goal was to integrate as much as legacy equipment as possible, control them and open the flexibility potential of long and short lifecycle assets, PV panels, battery storage and EV chargers. In total, 208 families and 6 SMEs were involved in the different pilot sites where our technicians connected the local hardware. In some cases, solutions were unsuccessful, or alternatives had to be worked out when manufacturers blocked the access by changing their firmware during the project (e.g. Huawei inverters)
The COFYbox work focused on the continuous development and improvement of the integrated hardware and software architecture of the COFYbox. It also consisted in ensuring the technical deployment and management of the COFYboxes produced and distributed in the field. The software development further enabled the COFYcloud with personal cloudspace, dashboard and configuration options. It also focused on the necessary local and cloud control components, enabling flexibility.
The cloud work enabled us to advance at the community level with the development of energy demand and production forecasting tools, simulations on community flexibility, the price-based control stack for implicit demand response (DR), explicit DR technology for flexibility services and the COFYcloud management tools for communities, including dashboard.
All the hardware and software developed were tested in real life conditions in our 5 pilots around Europe.
We created specific technological facilitation by providing infrastructure support for the developments aiming at effectively managing the solutions, creating efficient and secure cloud resources, and ensuring scalability during replication of our solutions (preparing for commercial uptake).
Extensive work has been done to give the project public visibility through a consistent branding on our website, dissemination activities and pilot site communication. Exploitation and market uptake activities mapped market opportunities and sought direct implementation of our services. Finally, policy recommendations were issued targeting mostly energy sharing and flexibility services.
All in all, the project led to significant technological improvements, even surpassing some of targets set in the proposal with parts already in business operations at our partners.
