The main objective of OPEN4CEC project is to develop an open and collaborative platform based on microservices to support sustainable transition towards Citizen Energy Communities (CEC).
The target users of OPEN4CEC are the Citizen Energy Communities and its members: urban consumers and prosumers, administrative buildings, local business entities, municipalities, storage facilities, EV charging stations, distributed generation and storage units, aggregators.
OPEN4CEC aims to provide applications for:
- Community members – Demand Side Management, Demand Response, load optimization, monitoring and control of smart appliances
- Distributed Generation & Storage – small/medium generation based on renewables and storage, including prosumers, generation forecast and optimization, sizing storage, Electric Vehicles (EV) management
- Citizen Energy Communities – business models for aggregators, local energy/flexibility markets, auctions, smart contracts and settlement.
OPEN4CEC will be scalable and tailored to cope with the diversity of CEC and various developing stages in terms of Demand Side Management, regulatory framework, regional, economic and social awareness, technological implementation (smart metering), privacy and cybersecurity challenges and barriers.
For modularity and scalability, several layers are envisioned to be included in OPEN4CEC:
- Layer 1 – Awareness, Acceptance & Adoption of Energy Communities.
- Layer 2 – Load Control, Optimization & Analytics for members of the Energy Communities.
- Layer 3 – Predictive & Proactive support for Distributed Generation & Storage.
- Layer 4 – Market trading & Business models for Citizen Energy Communities.
Due to its open character, OPEN4CEC will increase the speed of digital transformation in energy and stimulate innovation. It will bring together heterogenous stakeholders such as energy service providers, grid operators, industry, SME, start-ups or highly motivated individuals to trade using innovative energy business solutions.
As novelty and original contributions, the project proposes digital solutions that integrate Internet of Things (IoT), data and models (decision theory in resource allocation, linear programming, Artificial Intelligence, heuristic models) into a Microservice-based Reference Architecture (MRA) to support the sustainability and replicability of Energy Communities.
Based on our preliminary research, OPEN4CEC will be valuable for Energy Communities and civil society as it will bring significant economic, environmental impact and social benefits, providing means to interact and trade on a decentralized trustable platform. It will have impact on 1) citizens improving the living standard as energy will be more affordable and will bring revenue; 2) the business sector helping them to create new energy services; 3) urban authorities to understand behavioral changes, increase awareness, support and interact with CEC; 4) research sector to foster the efforts in this direction.
OPEN4CEC will offer models, guidelines and insights to be capitalized by urban authorities and business environment.