Demo 5 — Spain
Empowering Renewable Energy Communities in Fornes
Grid-supporting Rural Renewable Energy Community
Domain
Electricity, Heat
Partners involved
- Cuerva
- Vergy
- Aggregering
- European Dynamics
- Schneider Electrics
- AIR Institute
- Universidad de Málaga
- LIST
The Spanish demo, situated in Fornes in the region of Granada, focuses on a group of buildings with different multi energy assets forming a Renewable Energy Community (REC). Being a small village with strong agricultural activity and growing popularity in rural tourism, Fornes is fully digitized as part of the Cuerva Living Lab, equipped with real-time sensors and meters. In this demonstrator, management and optimization of buildings within a REC beyond shared self-consumption models will be addressed, with the objective of tackling energy poverty and increasing energy independence.
Fornes experiences hot temperatures, with an average daily maximum/minimum temperature of 35ºC/20ºC in Summer and 13ºC/5ºC in Winter, making air-to-air heat pumps crucial for HVAC. Given the high irradiation that Fornes enjoys all year long, many houses have solar thermal collectors, which can provide up to 60% of the annual energy needed for domestic hot water and heating support in winter.
Through this demo, the Fornes REC will be transformed into a REC-based active utility node, resulting in enhanced smartness levels and interoperability. With user-friendly interfaces and AI/ML-based tools, occupants and the aggregator will significantly improve interaction with the energy ecosystem, allowing the REC to offer optimized flexibility services to the DSO.
- Improve the efficiency of the individual REC’s buildings and the REC as a whole by deploying a digital platform;
- Enable REC’s building occupants and/or the REC’s aggregator to offer flexibility services to the DSO;
- Develop a Digital Twin that recreates the interactive REC’s buildings, their assets and their energy ecosystem (networks and markets) for evaluating investments, technologies, use cases and business models;
- Assess the convenience of using either blockchain or centralized transaction managers for ledgering REC member transactions;
- Increase the interoperability levels of REC buildings to trigger intelligence and operability within REC clusters.
- 30 kWp in small PV plants for shared self-consumption;
- 85 kWp of on-roof PV in different households;
- 1 x3.3 kW/6.4kWh batteries;
- 22 kW V2G EV, fast DC chargers;
- Advanced LV and MV supervisor in each secondary substation;
- Feeder mapping of each supply point;
- Digital Twin of each LV grid;
- Smart-meter in each supply point;
- Air-to-air heat pumps for HVAC.
- Demonstrate how using digital platforms for REC’s buildings operation enables open and secure access, as well as interoperability;
- Showcase that intelligent REC’s buildings can offer ancillary and flexibility services to the DSO effectively;
- Illustrate that digital operation platforms’ intelligent tools enhance REC’s multi-energy buildings’ efficiency and user satisfaction;
- Validate the feasibility of new business models for smart management of buildings and building clusters constituted as RECs;
- Exemplify the interest and utility of Digital Twins in decision-making for planning, operation, and exploitation of buildings constituting as RECs.
