by Stella Arapoglou, project coordination team @Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Heading towards the energy future: how is the Renaissance approach being developed?
Targeting to bring a new era in the energy production and consumption, H2020 Renaissance has reached the milestone of two-year implementation (the project started in May 2019). To the current date, valuable input has built already a number of results, which will lead to the outmost goal: renewable integration and sustainability in energy communities.
During these two years, a lot has happened, including COVID-19. For Renaissance, this was the time to set up the technical requirements and prerequisites for the Renaissance approach, which are up and running already:
- SW & HW installation progress is in an advanced status in all the four EU Pilot Sites
- The forecasting modules of the optimization tool have been developed together with a more detailed optimization engine, namely the Renergise tool
- The Renaissance Information Platform and its different layers have been successfully developed and tested; interaction with Pilot Sites is also available
- Energy Node Integration is ready to operate as a state-of-the-art device
- The detailed smart contract design set the foundation for smart contract application
Last but not least, what Renaissance achieved was to bring consumers into this energy dream; using the MAMCA methodology in Manzaneda, Eemnes Municipality and Kimmeria, we managed to bring together all stakeholders of each Pilot Site and actually measure their opinion and expectations! Working with actual users has proven to be refreshing and hopefully efficient. In order to measure efficiency, replicability and scalability will be tested. Already ongoing in Poland, MAMCA workshops are being organized in India and Spain and soon in other countries around the world.
Next steps
As our 1st Periodic Report and review was successfully concluded, the Renaissance Consortium is moving fast: focus on dissemination of the results and developments are already being planned, scientific articles have been published and conferences are being organized to ensure uninterrupted contact with the public.
