Supporting Energy Communities - Operational Research and Energy Analytics (SEC-OREA)

The SEC-OREA project enables local energy communities (LECs) to participate in the decarbonisation of the energy sector by developing advanced efficient algorithms and analytics technologies.

LECs are an efficient way to manage energy by increasing the use of renewable energy sources (RES) at a local level. We aim to co-create an overarching LEC enabling framework with our stakeholders. Our goal is to create technical tools to empower citizens and place them at the core of the Energy Union. It is important to ensure that the participation of LECs in the energy systems transformation has the desired effect of decarbonising the system, and that this is done in a fair manner without destabilising the power system. We propose to use business analytics to define our stakeholders' research and innovation question, and to use energy analytics and operational research techniques to gather appropriate data, build statistical and machine learning models, and mathematical optimisation models to find solutions and support decision making by our stakeholders..

The consortium brings together expertise from Business, Climatology, Computational Methods, Secure ICT, and Power Systems. We reach across the EU with researchers, innovators and stakeholders in Belgium, France, Ireland, Latvia and Portugal. Stakeholders include a national meteorological service, an LEC, and a distribution system operator (DSO).

We use climate services to gather energy-relevant pan-European indicators of climate trends and variability. We model energy consumption data to understand and create dynamic scenarios of electricity consumption. This allows us to capture the uncertainty in the availability of RES, and the electricity demand of the LEC. We create ensemble models of climate dependent RES and consumer electricity demand. We create and solve a set of mathematical optimisation models to solve the multilateral economic dispatch (MED) of the LEC RES in a fair manner. We evaluate the implications of the LEC activity and net demand on sample grid topologies, and support the DSO to understand the impacts of, and requirements for LECs on the low voltage (LV) distribution network. This understanding supports the LEC and DSO decisions on asset reinforcement, network power flow and congestion management.

We provide recommendations for an overarching LEC enabling framework to ensure safe reliable efficient sustainable operation of the LEC and LV network. Our framework will allow LEC members to take ownership of the energy transition, benefit from the new technologies we develop and so reduce their bills and their carbon footprint. We provide business model analyses, efficient scalable multilateral economic dispatch and energy analytics algorithms, and integrated climate/LEC/LV models to support all stakeholder decision makers.