Supporting Energy Communities- Operational Research and Energy Analytics – SEC-OREA

SEC-OREA 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.
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, municipalities and energy agencies who support the development of LECs, and a distribution system operator (DSO).
We use climate services to gather energy-relevant pan-European indicators of climate trends and variability. We use better data to model energy consumption data to understand and create dynamic scenarios of electricity consumption. We create better ensemble models of climate dependent RES generation and consumer electricity demand. We create a set of mathematical optimisation models to efficiently solve the multilateral economic dispatch (MED) decisions 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 better 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 our climatology, meteorological services, smart city and energy agencies stakeholder decision makers.