ENPOWER is a Horizon Europe project initiative which will design, develop and demonstrate SSH-driven methodologies, interactive and closed-loop tools, and data-driven services for energy-activated citizens and energy-secure cross-sector communities towards a citizen-centric energy system. We combine leading-edge ICTs with social/behavioural dimensions and with sharing economy and value stacking business models to deploy:
1) a Social Science Framework for energy citizens activation and innovative multi-dimensional incentives for citizens’ participation in energy markets;
2) AI-based consumers clustering and segmentation algorithms;
3) interactive tools and facilitation services for energy community planning;
4) Energy Data Space adaptation to support community-level data-driven activation and interoperable automated privacy and sovereignty-preserving Demand Response (DR);
5) P2P DLT/Blockchain digital marketplace for tokenized energy and non-energy assets reciprocal compensation;
6) data-driven services and apps for energy efficiency and activation performance management;
7) ICT services and Digital Twins for community-level energy optimization and aggregated flexibility management to trade off local self-consumption against grid service provisioning, while boosting a beyond-energy community social welfare;
8) Edge monitoring hubs for automated DR; 9) Business Sandbox for novel sharing economy and social innovation-based business models;
10) methodologies for evaluating different energy community setups, upscaling and replication.
ENPOWER framework will be validated along 4 Front Runners energy communities pilots and further replicated in 2 Early Adopters, covering different levels of maturity of communities, to demonstrate increased RES local self-consumption and consumers participation to the energy markets, while nurturing increased local security of supply. ENPOWER Leadership Programme and blueprints will support EU-wide replication and advice regulatory bodies on communities-friendly enabling frameworks.
Enasco’s role in the project:
Within this project, our company will cooperate with Békéscsaba Energia ESCO Ltd. on one of the early adopter pilot cases, which will be located in Békéscsaba, Hungary. Our goal is to build an energy community and increase community engagement in Békéscsaba. This pilot will be a municipality-driven pilot, committed to using the technologies and results tested in the Front Runners pilots, which will help us find the right solutions and business models adapted to the local situation.
There are many definitions for community engagement but in its simplest terms community engagement seeks to better engage citizens to achieve long-term and sustainable results, processes, relationships or implementation.
