ISGAN Virtual Learning and OptiREC project invite you to an insightful webinar on the approaches to integrate Energy Communities into the Spanish electricity system.

The EU policy recognizes energy communities as pivotal for achieving energy transition goals. However, integrating this new actor into the existing electricity system landscape remains an open topic, especially as large-scale energy community development reaches a critical mass impacting system and market operations.

The OptiREC project investigates the technical and regulatory challenges posed by the large-scale development and integration of energy communities within the Spanish electricity system. Join us for a webinar where we’ll discuss the OptiREC project’s achievements, focusing on the development of optimal multi-layer coordination among community members, Distribution System Operators (DSOs), and Transmission System Operators (TSOs).

Moreover, OptiREC presents two optimization models designed to simulate the operations of an Energy Community (EC), focusing on energy trading among peers and evaluating the EC’s potential to offer flexibility as a service to the distribution network operator (DSO). Employing the second-order cone programming representation, the mathematical formulations include the distribution network limitations and consider distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar panels, energy storage systems, electric vehicles, and heat pumps. The models were executed over a year with one-hour time steps using the IEEE European Low Voltage test feeder, adapted to a single-phase version, for testing the formulations. Thus, the first model reflects exclusive peer-to-peer (P2P) operations, while the second model isolates flexibility considerations. This approach enables a comprehensive examination of how introducing a flexibility market influences the trading patterns within the community. Through statistical analysis of the annual data generated by the optimization models, the study identifies hours with a higher likelihood for the EC to offer flexibility services and estimates the potential quantity of such services.

These insights provide valuable characterizations of the EC concerning demand, energy trading, and flexibility provision. As a result, the DSO could enhance daily operational planning conditions based on a better understanding of the EC’s dynamics and capabilities.

The speakers:

	Seyedamir Mansouri Universidad Pontificia Comillas IIT Institute for Research in Technology
	Albert Farriol Salas IREC Fundació Institut de Recerca en Energia de Catalunya

Intended audience

Researchers and academics interested in energy transition, community energy, and grid integration.
Technology providers and solution developers offering products and services for energy community integration and grid optimization.
Representatives from energy communities, including community organizers, leaders, and members.
Professionals and experts in the energy sector, including policymakers, regulators, and energy industry stakeholders.
Utility companies, DSOs, and TSOs seeking insights into integrating energy communities into the electricity system.

Key messages

• Cloud computing platforms to integrate energy communities into existing energy markets.
• Coordinated frameworks to extract flexibility from community members.
• P2P power sharing among community members to enhance economic, technical, and efficiency indices.

Utilizing untapped Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) potential from customers in the distribution grid necessitates TSO-DSO-Customer coordination. Customers, who consume, store, or generate electricity, have shown attractive potential for ancillary services to power systems, but they still face challenges managing and marketing their flexibility in the energy market. Aggregators can facilitate these flexibilities as an intermediary by providing services to different power systems participants. This poses new challenges for monitoring, controlling, and coordinating customers’ and other market player’s needs.

This webinar aims to disseminate knowledge about aggregators in power systems, address the challenges encountered, both technical and non-technical, and share experiences from pilot projects. Participants will gain insights to apply and expand the impact of aggregator roles in the context of their own countries.

Speakers

	Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Sebastian Lehnhoff OFFIS
	Marcel Otte OFFIS
	Dr.-Ing. Jirapa Kamsamrong OFFIS
	Annike Abromeit EEBUS
	Dr. Christian Kunze Smart Innovation Norway
Moderates:
	Dr. José Pablo Chaves Ávila Comillas Pontifical University

Intended audience

Policymakers, TSOs, DSOs, NGOs, aggregators, governmental agencies, researchers, interested participants, students, etc.

Key messages

A regulatory framework with a clear definition of the aggregator role should be established in each country to enhance competitiveness, transparency, and societal welfare. Coordination approaches have to be established among aggregators, customers and grid operator with the focus on harmonised and interoperable solutions. Moreover, innovative approaches can be tested in demonstration and R&D projects with temporary regulatory changes and experiments (e.g. regulatory sandboxes), which can help to address the technical and non-technical challenges and support needed for the real deployment.

Modern digital telecommunication infrastructures will soon allow to be adjusted to the energy industry needs, providing the opportunity to implement edge computing trough cloud native applications.

To simplify the integration of the 5G digital telco infrastructures’ functionalities, increasing reliability and flexibility and reducing the latency, the Smart5Grid project propose the concept of Network Applications, together with a platform to automatically validate and verify those applications, fostering the creation of a new ecosystem of device virtualization experts.

Further reading: https://smart5grid.eu/dissemination-activities/brochures/

Speaker

Daniele Porcu (Enel Grids)

Intended audience

System Operators’ O&M experts, Technology experts and researchers, System integrators, Junior engineers and students, SMEs and technologic start-ups, device manufacturers for power plants automation (production, transmission, distribution)

Key messages

• 5G offers the opportunity to interact with the Core Network to provide services
• The complexity of such integration is a barrier, but Smart5Grid project proposes an innovative approach
• We are able to provide a novel concept of Network Application to simplify the 5G complexity
• Our set of tools can facilitate the access to this technology, fostering the creation of a new market segment for digital services: they are open for everyone who wants to learn more!