HowER

Project objectives

EU Directive 2018/2001 introduces a new category of collective self-consumption called "renewable energy community" (CER), an aggregation of users that exchange the renewable energy produced by the production units held. The main purpose of establishing CERs is to foster further development of the exploitation of renewable energy sources (RES) and efficient use of energy by consumers.

In fact, once the national transposition of community legislation has been completed, CERs will be able to present themselves on the energy and energy services markets offering greater power and greater flexibility compared to theingol consumer osingor Distributed Energy Resources (RED) unit.

The research project aims to study the management and control methodologies of REDs available in a CER, taking into particular consideration:

• both passive and active residential users, i.e. capable of providing Active Demand (AD) services, controlling their own electrical and thermal loads in order to modify the time distribution and/or the intensity of the absorbed powers;
• systems for the production of electrical and thermal energy from RES, both autonomous and inserted in plants of active users;
• energy storage systems, in particular electrochemical storage systems (including on-board systems of electric vehicles being charged connected to active user systems) and thermal storage (both hot and cold).

The project intends, therefore, to develop decision support tools, through:

• forecast algorithms in the medium and short term of the various REDs that make up the CERs;
• tools for monitoring and controlling RED;
• optimization algorithms to support CER management.

Finally, the tools will be implemented on a commercial platform particularly suitable for the development of energy management and control systems, in order to:

• validate the proposed methodologies and tools developed in an experimental application
• favor the potential technological transfer of the results to companies interested in creating and selling CER management and control systems.

Start and end date

October 2021 - October 2024

Project Manager

Dr. Francesco Conte

Coordinating institution of the project

University of Cassino and Southern Lazio - Department of IngElectrical and Information Engineering

Funding source(s).

Lazio region

Economic value of the project

Budget: € 149.714,25

Total funding: €149.714,25