Local Energy Communities (LECs) will be an important element of the future energy system. These community-led cooperatives cooperate in the production, distribution, storage and supply of energy at local level with the aim to maximize the on-site generation and the self-consumption of renewable energy. To implement a LEC, local stakeholders with their energy planners (the need owners) must be enabled to identify the optimal structure of their LEC energy system and assess the related benefits in order to convince the citizens to join the cooperative. To identify the optimal energy system design of a LEC is a challenge, since the availability of local energy resources must be considered as well as the coupling of the electricity, heating, cooling and mobility sectors, the temporal dynamic by renewable energy sources, the flexibility options and the local energy cost structure. Since related design, control and monitoring tools for LECs are not available yet, CLUE will develop and validate such an innovative planning tool for LECs. Components providing flexibility are key for LECs, CLUE will evaluate different flexibility technologies in five demonstration sites to understand their potential under different framework conditions. The integration of the LECs in the surrounding energy system is another aspect covered by CLUE, by identification of KPIs, which are relevant for the DSO of the surrounding electricity system to interact with the LEC in an optimal way. The integration of LECs in the future ICT architecture (hierarchical/decentral) will be analyzed based on existing architectures (e.g., web-of-cells approach). CLUE will demonstrate the tool as well as evaluate different technological flexibility options in 5 demos In an innovation lab in Austria further flexibility from e-mobility combined with contact-less automatic charging will be integrated (Burgenland) and the combination of a central storage and several intelligent energy management systems (Styria).

New smart energy products and services will be explored, implemented and tested in the LECs as for example blockchain-based services (e.g., energy ledger, contact-less automatic charging of e-vehicles). The different types of LEC stakeholders (need owners), e.g. cooperatives, project developer, DSOs, owners and operators of LECs, utilities, supplier of energy and ICT infrastructure will participate in CLUE. Thereby, the relevant internal and external drivers, success factors and barriers (technical, economic and regulatory) for LECs can be identified in co-creation workshops and transition paths can be developed. LECs differ a lot since their energy and organizational structure must be adapted to local framework conditions (energy sources, demand, regulation, etc.). CLUE will contribute to the replication of LECs by providing the experiences from different best practice solutions, an innovative planning tool.

This project has been funded by partners of the ERA-Net SES 2018 joint call RegSys (www.eranet-smartenergysystems.eu) – a network of 30 national and regional RTD funding agencies of 23 European countries. As such, this project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 775970.