Project
Bound to accelerate the roll-out of energy communities and empower consumers
COMMUNITAS principal goal is to pave the way for the empowerment and engagement of different types of consumers and prosumers, placing them at the heart of energy markets. It will do so by boosting the creation and exploiting the potentialities of ECs as hubs for innovative energy services, integrated with non-energy benefits, co-created together with citizens and other stakeholders.
The project will put consumers organised in ECs at the forefront of the digitalisation, decentralisation, decarbonisation, and democratisation of the energy sector.
As prosumers may not be experts in the energy field or may not be available to frequently engage with energy markets, rule-based automatic trading and reward mechanisms to improve prosumers satisfaction and participation in the energy markets will be adopted in the real-life pilots of the project.
Summarizing, COMMUNITAS has citizens at the centre of its own approach, thus they will be involved in Social and Policy Labs across the whole project, in order to frequently factor in their feedback, wishes and needs into the core developments of the project.
A holistic approach to support ECs and make consumers active market players
Information technologies such as IoT and Blockchain also show potential as a way to provide citizens with a method for interacting with the energy markets, namely by enabling the aggregation of loads or tracking energy and monetary transactions performed at local level. COMMUNITAS will explore such technologies and use them to provide an innovative set of 12 Innovative Solutions (IS) to unlock citizens’ active participation in energy markets (all integrated into an open, digital “one-stop-shop” COMMUNITAS Core Platform (CCP)), allowing EC members to have an aggregated position in the energy markets and explore ancillary services.
COMMUNITAS will test, monitor, and validate all its set of 12 ISs, following the 3Ls knowledge transfer framework across 8 different, yet complementary, real-life pilot sites, the majority of which were the stage of previous innovative projects. The large climate, social and geographical diversity of the pilots’ ecosystem aims to enhance the impact of the project towards the EU-wide uptake of ECs.
A growing potential for EU citizens to be at the heart of the energy transition: benefits to be reaped via DR
COMMUNITAS will promote energy citizenship, enabling citizens to take control of their own path towards sustainability by becoming an active element of the energy markets.
Activities conducted within the project duration will also generate new business models that finance and support the set-up of ECs, leading to new market roles and frameworks.
It will also develop a Knowledge Base that will provide users with technical, administrative, and legal information on ECs, streamlining the creation and expansion of this concept.
