Can INESC TEC change the management of energy communities? Our partners believe so! Following the DIGITAL-CER project, INESC TEC licensed a digital platform for the management of renewable energy communities – RECreation -, which will be used by Capwatt, a company present in Portugal, Mexico, Spain and Italy, specialised in sustainable solutions for the decarbonisation of energy consumption, with a vast portfolio of operational projects and recognised as an independent energy producer.
The DIGITAL-CER project, funded by the Portugal 2020 programme – with the participation of Capwatt -, led to the development of a platform for the management of collective self-consumption and renewable energy communities. RECreation will be tested at the Sonae Campus, located in Maia, with the objective of validating different technologies for the planning and management of collective self-consumption and renewable energy communities – in private or public electricity networks in the industrial and business sectors. Moreover, ERSE – Energy Services Regulatory Authority approved a pilot-project (promoted by INESC TEC, Capwatt and Fundo Imosede, which also features e-Redes’ support) which will integrate the RECreation platform to test a sharing mechanism based on dynamic coefficients – one of the main aspects of Portuguese regulation on self-consumption and energy communities.
José Villar, INESC TEC researcher, mentioned that RECreation is a product with commercial potential and relevance to the energy market. “This digital platform integrates different tools necessary for the management of self-consumption and energy communities. One of the examples is a dashboard to monitor the operation of a community in terms of energy and financial, showing the local energy transactions and the savings associated with energy sharing. Other examples are the access to a community’s energy and financial database, and a set of modules for local energy transactions, for the settlement of financial offsets, and for the sizing of new energy resources, as described in the work “Operation and simulation of a renewable energy community based on a local post-delivery pool market“, published in the EEA Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore.
RECreation has the potential to contribute to the exploitation of renewable energy, promoting the development of a sustainable economy at the local level, using local renewable energy production and sharing, with social, environmental and economic benefits.
In the future, INESC TEC hopes that other partners can also benefit from this technology – with its use being subject to licensing processes.
INESC TEC has developed key research work in self-consumption and energy communities and has actively participated in public consultations with ERSE and the Directorate-General for Energy and Geology (DGEG), thus contributing to important regulation in the energy sector. “In terms of analysis and proposals for sharing mechanisms – dynamic and hierarchical – we have identified the strengths and weaknesses of current regulation and presented proposals for the integration of local energy markets and future flexibility markets, based on self-consumption regulation,” said the researcher.
By developing and licensing this platform to a company in the electricity sector, INESC TEC reinforces its role as a technological partner in the energy market roadmap.
The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC.
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