Key Tools

COMMUNITAS will develop an open, interoperable, and modular COMMUNITAS Core Platform, as the project’s main tool to boost the adoption and optimise the operation of ECs as a centre of excellence for the deployment of energy and non-energy services.

The platform will actuate as a one-stop-shop, since it will be composed of innovative modules (KO2-KO4) that will be used, in real-life pilot sites (KO7) by ESCos and cooperatives (EDP NEW, Enercoop, WVT and Grunneger Power), citizens and communities as a way to bridge
the gap between energy markets and consumers.

Integrated with the CCP, COMMUNITAS will develop a Knowledge Base to support stakeholders in setting up ECs by providing the background knowledge from a legal, financial, social, and administrative perspective, considering the different national contexts involved.

Two innovative tools will be developed on the field of community-level, real-time optimization of DERs and DR for optimal market position, aiming to provide citizens with the proper tools to engage in energy markets via their participation in ECs, whose manager, central to COMMUNITAS, will act similarly to an aggregator in its interaction with the energy markets, with the added responsibilities of engaging citizens, understanding their behaviours, constantly assessing their flexibility potential, and pushing price-signals.

The development of these tools will be framed by COMMUNITAS’ social and citizen engagement strategy, and will be tested in real life demos. The two tools will communicate in the way that the community-level optimization of DERs will receive market positions from the DR schemes, according to the available and dispatchable demand-side flexibility.

The development of the referred tools will take into consideration both the initial recommendations on emergent market roles and frameworks needed to comply with the DR-based market participation of end-users and the identified incentive and pricing measures, beyond cost reduction given real-time marginal prices.

Through Beyond the legal, financial, social, administrative support, COMMUNITAS will also deliver three tools to technically assist (potential) users/managers of ECs:

• Planning Tool to support the creation of ECs (under-planning), optimizing the selection and sizing of the best technologies to be adopted;
• Management Platform, for the EC manager to smoothly operate the EC and communicate relevant information for its users (and vice-versa);
• Investment Advisor, supporting already-operational ECs in its process of expansion, i.e., exploration of new energy and non-energy investments (e.g. eMob, EE measures) with technical and financial KPIs (non-energy services will be as well developed by the consortium, focusing on comfort and wellbeing).

All of them will comply with the social engagement actions, and real-life testing.

COMMUNITAS will demonstrate two innovative market frameworks: P2P energy market platform (underpinned by a tokens-based marketplace to users’ engagement and market clearance mechanisms) and Guarantees of Origin Marketplace, whose main novelty is that it will be operated within the context of an EC.

COMMUNITAS intends to exploit ECs as a new opportunity to rethink P2P and GoO (EC manager to track RES and negotiate GoOs accordingly) as additional sources of income for communities to finance their investments in sustainable assets, spreading the roll-out of these markets (although some proof of concepts exist, they are yet to be proven effective and widely adoptable), since citizens will have a facilitated access to those markets, via the EC managers.

The two tools will follow the project’s engagement methodology for citizen and consumer engagement and value-based proposition design in ECs, and will be tested in real-life demos.