Storages are unavoidable components of the future smart grid with large share of variable renewable generation. However, the unit-cost of energy, that is retrieved from storages, is several times higher than the cost of energy consumed upon its output from RES. Therefore, there is a strong requirement on the optimisation of storage capacities deployed in the grid. This is especially true for the small energy sites such as DER and prosumers’ microgrids which are the segments, targeted by the SHAR-Q bottom-up concept. The principal objective of the SHAR-Q is to optimize the storage capacities deployed in the grid with the help of a peer-to-peer interoperability network that connects neighbourhooding RES+Storage ecosystems into a collaboration framework. Thus, the optimization of storage capacities can be achieved through their sharing among the participating actors. To get connected to the SHAR-Q network, an open interoperability gateway with semantic interface descriptors will be provided that will be based on the most adopted standards in the field. Moreover, the users will be provided with an ability to manage their contribution to the collaborative models on their own in a way that resembles the well-known social web portals (e.g. users can control with whom they wish to share specific storage capacities). The viability of the collaborative business models will be proven through added-value services, deployed over the SHAR-Q interoperability network, that will be demonstrated in 3 different pilots, targeting 3 different segments of end-users such as neighborhoods of distributed RES, coalitions of prosumers and locations with e-vehicle charging stations. The SHAR-Q research and innovation activities will be driven by the opinion of stakeholders involved in the SHAR-Q stakeholder advisory board. Their feedback will be carefully monitored throughout the project duration. Such approach is supposed to maximise the adoption potential of the SHAR-Q concept.

The lack of interoperability is considered as the most important barrier to achieve the global integration of IoT ecosystems across borders of different disciplines, vendors and standards. Indeed, the current IoT landscape consists of a large set of isolated islands that do not constitute a real internet, preventing the exploitation of the huge potential expected by ICT visionaries. To overcome this situation, VICINITY presents a virtual neighborhood concept, which is a decentralized, bottom-up and cross-domain approach that resembles a social network, where users can configure their set ups, integrate standards according to the services they want to use and fully control their desired level of privacy. VICINITY then automatically creates technical interoperability up to the semantic level. This allows users without technical background to get connected to the vicinity ecosystem in an easy and open way, fulfilling the consumers needs. Furthermore, the combination of services from different domains together with privacy-respectful user-defined share of information, enables synergies among services from those domains and opens the door to a new market of domain-crossing services. VICINITY's approach will be demonstrated by a large-scale demonstration connecting 8 facilities in 7 different countries. The demonstration covers various domains including energy, building automation, health and transport. VICINITY's potential to create new, domain-crossing services will be demonstrated by value added services such as micro-trading of DSM capabilities, AI-driven optimization of smart urban districts and business intelligence over IoT. Open calls are envisioned in the project to integrate further, preferably public, IoT infrastructures and to deploy additional added value services. This will not only extend the scale of VICINITY demonstration, but also efficiently raise the awareness of industrial communities of VICINITY and its capabilities.

As an active key actor in the spatial planning and social innovation arena for Renewable Energy Landscapes REL, the PEARLS project will reinforce the population’s commitment to secure, clean and efficient energy. REL are regarded as spaces where renewable energies change the population’s relationship with energy and their landscape perception. Despite all efforts, resistance to REL lingers in Europe/the U.S., while the reasons for strong social acceptance in Mediterranean and South American countries is still unknown. Thus PEARLS will focus on Southern Europe and Israel due to their wealth of renewable energy resources and citizens’ deep engagement with REL. PEARLS will radically transform scientific knowledge on how to best implement REL across Europe and extend southern landscapes towards other Mediterranean countries through participant networks. PEARLS will generate a step change in the way that REL are theorised, detected and addressed and provide crucial support for the Pan-European Energy Challenge by establishing international, intersectoral and multidisciplinary collaboration as the nexus of a five-country holistic pool of universities and research centres in close cooperation with non-academic sectors. All Partnership members, from five universities and nine non-academic beneficiaries (companies, private consultancies, cooperatives and business associations) have proven expertise and experience in working with renewable energy, energy policy, REL, spatial planning and social innovation, through the internationalisation of applied research and training for capacity development. Via secondments, staff exchange and collaborative inquiry, the project will investigate how to enforce renewable energy best practice to contribute to the Energy Challenge. Deliverables will be provided by working reports, websites, video channels, toolkits, training and methodology materials, seminars, and scientific papers, academic journals and books.

The rising decentralization of the energy system is unveiling an enormous opportunity for energy stakeholders to leverage on big data & AI technologies to improve decision making. There are however some barriers hampering the exploitation of this potential, such as the lack of standardized big data architectures for smart grids and regulatory frameworks not enabling data sharing. In that respect BD4NRG will i) deliver a reference architecture for Smart Energy, which aligns BDVA SRIA, IDSA and FIWARE architectures, SAREF standard and extend COSMAG specification to enable B2B multi-party data exchange, while providing full interoperability of leading-edge big data technologies with smart grid standards and operational frameworks ii) evolve and upscale a number of TRL 5-6 technology enablers, such as scalable sovereignty-preserving hybrid DLT/off-chain data governance, big data elastic pipeline orchestration, IoT/edge AI-based federated learning and multi-resource sharing tokenized marketplace, loosely integrate and deploy them within the TRL 7-8 BD4NRG framework iii) deliver a TRL8 open modular big data analytic toolbox as front-end for one-stop-shop analytics services development by orchestrating legacy and/or third party assets (data, computing resources, models, algorithms) iv) validate such framework through the delivery of predictive and prescriptive edge AI-based big data analytics on 13 large scale pilots, deployed by different energy stakeholders (TSOs and DSOs power network operators, aggregators, storage/renewable assets operators, local energy communities, ESCOs, power market operators, municipalities, financial institutions and ENTSO-E), fully covering the energy value chain v) setup a vibrant data-driven ecosystem through the SGBDAA Alliance, which will federate new energy data providers, attract SMEs for novel energy services provisioning through cascading funding and validate a hybrid energy/industry value chain supporting B2B joint digital platforms.

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.