The European energy market is rapidly changing under the influence of three megatrends that currently drive the transformation of energy sectors worldwide: decarbonization, decentralization and digitalization. These megatrends have stimulated several technical and social innovations in the energy sector, which offer alternatives to the traditional business model of large centralized energy utilities and have the potential to further the goals of the Energy Union. One such example of social innovation in the energy sector are new forms of local energy communities that generate, store and use energy in a collaborative way and hence allow consumers to get involved in the production and storage of energy (“prosumage”) at the local level. New clean energy communities in a changing European energy system (NEWCOMERS) are often democratic and participatory in nature and at the same time characterized by unconventional alliances of actors, the use of innovative and smart technologies and new forms of value creation for their members and society. The NEWCOMERS project aims to investigate which regulatory, institutional and social conditions, at the national and local level, are favorable for the emergence and operation of new clean energy communities. Furthermore, NEWCOMERS will explore how these new clean energy communities meet their members’(i.e. citizens’ and consumers’) needs better than more traditional energy services business models and whether they have the potential to increase the affordability of energy, their members’ energy literacy and efficiency in the use of energy, as well as their members’ and society’s support for the clean energy transition. The ultimate goal of the NEWCOMERS project is to identify the types of clean energy communities that perform best along a variety of dimensions, such as resilience, citizen engagement, security, efficiency and affordability, while being based on sustainable business models that have the potential to be scaled-up.

Four European TSOs of Central-Eastern Europe (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia), associated with power system experts, electricity retailers, IT providers and renewable electricity providers, propose to design a unique regional cooperation scheme: it aims at opening Balancing and Redispatching markets to new sources of flexibility and supporting such sources to act on such markets competitively. Thanks to a prototype aggregation solution and renewable generation forecasting techniques, flexibility providers – distributed generators (DG) and Commercial and Industrial (C&I) consumers providing demand response (DR) – are enabled, through retailers acting as flexibility aggregators, to provide competitive offers for Frequency Restoration Reserve (including secondary control activated with a response time between 30 seconds and 15 minutes). A comprehensive techno-economic model for the cross-border integration of such services involves a common activation function (CAF) tailored to congested borders and optimized to overcome critical intra-regional barriers. The resulting CAF is implemented into a prototype Regional Balancing and Redispatching Platform, securely integrated within the four TSOs’ IT systems: this makes research activities about cross-border integration flexible while linking with the aggregation solution. Use cases of growing complexity are pilot tested, going from the involvement of DR and DG into national balancing markets to cross-border competition between flexibility aggregators. Based on past experience with tertiary reserve, participating C&I consumers and DG are expected to provide close to 40MW of secondary reserve. Impact analyses of the pilot tests together with dissemination activities towards all the stakeholders of the electricity value chain will recommend business models and deployment roadmaps for the most promising use cases, which, in turn, contribute to the practical implementation of the European Balancing Target Model by 2020.

The Electric Vehicles Management for carbon neutrality in Europe (EV4EUThe Electric Vehicles Management for carbon neutrality in Europe (EV4EU) project will propose and implement bottom-up and user-centric Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) management strategies creating the conditions for the mass deployment of electric vehicles. The strategies will consider the impact on batteries, the needs of the users, power systems, the integration with energy markets, and cities’ transformation. The proposed V2X management strategies will be tested in four demonstration sites, allowing an evaluation of the proposed methodologies and tools, the definition of the appropriate implementation conditions, and a consolidation of the most promising solutions and business models. Technology providers will test different V2X management approaches, evaluating their feasibility and adequacy for the existing conditions in cities. System Operators will estimate the impact of V2X on transmission and distribution levels, proposing new services to profit from V2X flexibility, mitigating the effect of V2X, and supporting the development of both V2X and renewables. Tools and Apps for electric vehicle users will be developed to provide valuable information about the use of electric vehicles and available energy services. An open platform that considers interoperability, scalability, security, and privacy requirements will ensure the information exchange between stakeholders and systems. The impact of V2X management strategies in different cities will be evaluated in a co-simulation tool considering different perspectives, namely, the power network, cities constraints (existing parking lots, buildings characteristics, etc.), electric vehicle use patterns, and, finally, V2X management strategies. New services (Green Charging, Sharing Charging, and Surge Pricing), Demand Response programs, and flexible capacity contracts will be designed and a regulatory framework promoting user adoption will be proposed.

While the electrical grid is moving from being a fully centralized to a highly decentralized system, grid operators have to change their operative business to accommodate for faster reactions and adaptive exploitation of flexibility. The topic has been subject of several research projects in the past years and reached a maturity that allows now the consideration of a final level, proposing an integrated view on the grid operations beyond the traditional barriers. OneNet aims at performing this critical step creating the conditions for a new generation of grid services able to fully exploit demand response, storage and distributed generation while creating fair, transparent and open conditions for the consumer. As result, while creating one network of Europe, the project aims to build a customer centric approach to grid operation. This ambitious view is achieved by proposing new markets, products and services and by creating a unique IT architecture. While a single platform for Europe is not thinkable, OneNet proposes innovative mechanisms of platform federation which are the key technical enablers for the proposed vision. The project has also very ambitious exploitation goals aiming at creating consensus on the solution far beyond the limits of the consortium partners thanks to a variety of actions including a large-scale forum for discussion within the international energy community. The complete concept is also proven in 4 cluster demos creating an involvement of an unprecedented number of countries and their grid operators in a single project. The consortium, in addition to a significant list of grid operators, includes also key IT players, leading research institutions and the two most relevant associations for grid operators, jointly providing a unique set of expertise in support to these challenging tasks.