Innovative tools and services to manage and empower energy communities

Projects are expected to deliver results that: 1. Integrate home and building assets efficiently using common IoT communication standards and SGAM architecture/data models (e.g. IEC CIM) for load, generation and storage.
2. Facilitate local energy trading and distributed grid services via micro-markets and peer-to-peer transactions, improving market participation for citizens.
3. Enhance integration of energy communities into European grids, boosting renewable energy share and flexibility use through transparent, market-based cost-sharing mechanisms.
4. Strengthen data exchange security for prosumer and customer resources and independent asset operators.
5. Create cross-sectoral synergies (electricity, gas, mobility, heating/cooling) at citizen and community levels.
6. Empower local governments and intermediaries, reinforcing community energy policies across EU Member States and improving local tool accessibility and user capacity for a decentralised, co-owned energy transition.

Projects must: 1. Develop open-source tools for shared energy community asset management (e.g. storage) and energy community optimisation (aggregator selection, smart contracts, peer-to-peer trading, self-consumption).
2. Build open-source AI-driven forecasting and advanced data analysis tools for customers and prosumers at household and community levels, covering consumption, production, storage, appliances and EVs.
3. Extend DSO SCADA and substation systems to enable autonomous grid asset control and integrate seamlessly with home/building energy management for local distribution grid services (constraint alleviation, reconfiguration, restoration, maintenance, energy quality), including real-time resource monetisation.
4. Integrate the above into a unified platform for cooperation among individual customers/prosumers, energy communities, aggregators and DSOs/TSOs to provide, procure and settle system-wide balancing and frequency regulation services.
5. Base the cooperation platform on plug-and-play integration of hardware and software ecosystem components, leveraging and extending SGAM architecture, common communication standards and data models (e.g. IEC CIM), and semantic interoperability (preferably ETSI SAREF ontologies).
6. Embed integration mechanisms within core customer/prosumer, DSO/TSO, aggregator and market operator systems, fully aligned with SGAM.
7. Develop tailored security solutions for private and public IoT communication networks and smart devices across energy carriers.
8. Ensure implementation of EU policy measures via quality assessments and by introducing national community energy targets.
9. Foster institutional alliances at local and regional levels and provide access to digital planning tools.
10. Identify legal, economic and regulatory barriers for network operators in offering smart consumption options.
11. Follow the IEC TR 63097 Smart Grid Roadmap and design solutions for off-the-shelf integration using common standards.
12. Engage energy communities, smart appliance and home/building energy management system manufacturers, DSOs and aggregators. Exclude TSOs/DSOs from owning or operating energy storage or EV recharge facilities (Directive (EU) 2019/944, Articles 33, 36, 54).
13. Demonstrate solutions in at least three energy communities in different EU countries and socio-economic contexts, each served by a secondary substation with advanced monitoring and control, close-to-autarky local generation, multiple vectors, significant storage and flexible topology.
14. Validate solutions using both technical and social criteria and collaborate with similar energy communities to enhance replication potential.
15. Contribute to the BRIDGE initiative and, where relevant, to AIOTI and other digital clusters.