EDP completes four-year Horizon 2020 energy flexibility pilot

Lisbon-headquartered multinational energy company EDP has announced the completion of Project Dominoes, a four-year pilot in which the utility tested various models for energy flexibility.

The utility secured €4 million ($4.7 million) in funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 initiative to launch the pilot in 2017. The trial included residential households and commercial customers exchanging electricity to meet varying energy demands to ensure the reliability of the grid, avoid power outages and reduce energy costs.

The aim of the project is to design a scalable local energy market solution that would enable the EU to accelerate the implementation of demand response, aggregation, grid management, and peer-to-peer trading services to achieve energy decarbonisation and sustainability goals.

Have you read?
Britain’s flexibility market shows ‘incredible growth’
SSEN testing open data sharing tool in net-zero transition pilot
Endesa unveils first-of-a-kind circular economy academy in Spain

The project explored the development of ICT components that can enable the local market concept, solutions for secure data handling and local market enabled transactions, demand response services, and a local energy market architecture.

Two benefits achieved from the pilot include:

• Users achieved savings amounting to almost 7% of their average energy bill, which translates into about €5 ($5.94) per month.

• Users who produce energy with PV solar panels can earn about €2,5 ($2.97) per month by selling surplus energy in the same markets.

The pilot was rolled out in two countries, Portugal and Finland. In Portugal, two projects were implemented with the one deployed in the municipality of Evora resulting in the development of an innovative local energy market model. In Finland, a virtual power plant was created. In addition, the pilot resulted in the development of a potential platform for managing local markets and a web application to interface between sellers and consumers. 

Project partners included Finnish university LUT (Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology); the University of Leicester (United Kingdom); and the University of Seville (Spain) and several organisations within the energy sector such as EDP NEW, E-REDES, and Virtual Power Solutions and ISEP – Porto Polytechnic School of Engineering.

EDP embarked on the project as part of efforts to invest in new and innovative solutions that would enable the utility to accelerate its digital transformation and transition to a clean, smart and digital grid of the future.