ACCEPT’s advances beyond the state-of-the-art are expected across the project’s key focus areas, namely the consumer engagement, business modelling and the creation of a digital toolbox for energy communities allowing them to participate in value-adding demand response schemes. Specifically:
• ACCEPT developed and implemented a participatory citizen engagement programme, with the aim of co-creating the project’s technical solutions to satisfy customer and energy community needs and requirements and validating the project’s developments and business models. Through this programme, the project provided valuable insights into consumer acceptability of demand response schemes. Finally, the project developed a multidisciplinary model that acknowledges the effects governance, organisational frameworks, and socio-economic/socio-cultural factors (including gender) have on individual/community participation and the wider social acceptability of the renewable energy infrastructure.
• In order to understand the underlying causes that shape the consumer energy consumption and consider them for forecasting future consumption trends at different network nodes, the ACCEPT project went beyond mere consumption forecasts based on historical consumption data. The project developed a Consumer Digital Twin, which encapsulates all necessary technical and behavioural information for analysing how and why energy is consumed within a building and in energy communities. It comprises of three models, the Citizen Digital Twin, which captures the daily activities and consumption patterns and behaviours of a building’s occupant, the Building Digital Twin, which captures all information related to the building and its existing energy infrastructure, and the Dynamic SRI-based performance rating of buildings, which assesses the smart readiness of the building.
• The ACCEPT Consumer Digital Twin, tested within the project activities, will allow a market actor to understand, anticipate and forecast energy/flexibility behaviour at the grid connection point. This will enable innovative business models, such as Heating/Amenity-as-a-Service, or conventional supply/aggregation models via the delivery of human-centric services at acceptable price points for any energy vector and building asset at hand.
• Finally, ACCEPT provided the means (models, techniques and control algorithms) to deliver a valuable flexibility lever for prosumers, considering their comfort preferences, through the implementation of an adaptive, prosumer-centric and context-aware virtual thermal energy storage module.
Based on the above, the wider expected impacts of the project refer to i) increased use of demand response schemes across a larger number and variety of consumers in Europe, ii) demonstrated and improved viability, reliability and acceptability of innovative compound services, increasing the uptake of such services by consumers, iii) increased data protection and privacy for customers, iv) improved accuracy of project models on flexibility and consumption and behaviour patterns, and v) increase available flexibility for accommodating more RES on the network.
