IELECTRIX – Indian and European Local Energy CommuniTies for Renewable Integration and the Energy Transition

DESCRIPTION

An increasing role is foreseen in Europe for local energy communities (LECs) to speed up the grid integration of RES. Today, the enabling role of DSOs in support of LECs is hampered by a lack of flexibility when planning cost-efficient LEC connections to their network at MV level, and by a lack of digitalization of the LV networks to make LEC’s smart prosumers benefit economically when serving the DSO flexibility needs.

IElectrix proposes development and demonstration activities of a set of holistic solutions and tools needed to further optimise local electricity networks in view of preparing the advent of local energy communities (LEC) as proposed by the European Commission’s Clean Energy Package. The currently proposed regulatory framework seeks to achieve a cost-effective integration of connected distributed Renewable Energy Sources by enabling all consumers to have local control of their own energy transition and thus favours the establishment of LECs.

OBJECTIVES

Four European DSOs (E.ON, ENEDIS, E.DIS, Güssing Stadtwerke) and an Indian DSO (TATA) have joined with IT-based, innovative product and solution providers, and technology and research centers, to demonstrate the combined roles of innovative functionalities serving the MV and LV networks, when implemented in 5 different regulatory regimes (Austria, France, Hungary, Germany, India- state of Delhi).

For MV networks, a mobile storage concept at substation level is demonstrated in Hungary, Germany and Austria. It enables DSOs to reduce investment uncertainties, avoid hindering future renewables connection and foster the local use of flexibility with participating non-regulated market solutions (Demand Side Response-DR-) For LV networks, 3 functional use cases served by ATOS and Schneider are tested simultaneously in Austria and India with prosumer support: i) Forecasting/scheduling of Distributed Energy Resources for the optimized energy management of Local Energy Systems, ii) Customized, human-centric prosumer participation in explicit DR programs using context-aware flexibility profiles, iii) Grid-forming/islanding capabilities in Local Energy Communities to optimize their energy system resilience.

The joint work of DSOS aims at accelerating scaling up and replication tested by HEDNO (Greece) and E.ON (Sweden). Dissemination towards players of the energy value chain recommends business models, possible regulatory adjustments and deployment roadmaps of the most promising use cases, in support of the implementation of the Clean Energy Package.

CIRCE´s ROLE

CIRCE is assessing the impact of the implementation of the solutions for each use-case and demo site, assessing the applicability of the demonstrated solutions across different sites, and the potential benefits both for alternative solutions at the demo sites and across a wider range of alternative sites with similar issues, and performing the cost-benefit analysis of the use cases.

Additionally, CIRCE participate actively in KPIs identification and in the definition of methodologies for their evaluation; as well as carrying out modelling and simulation studies of the demo-sites, aimed at performing the evaluation of use cases, along with identifying their technical and regulatory barriers so as to provide inputs for the scalability and replication studies.

PARTNERS

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