The kickoff meeting of the Intelligent Digital Renewable Energy Communities (idrECO) project took place this week. Juan Manuel Cochado and Javier Prieto from the BISITE Research Group met together with other consortium partners to discuss the first steps towards the achievement of the proposed objectives.

idrECO is an initiative that brings together several disciplines to investigate new energy use cases arising from technology-enhanced energy communities, both from a technological and economic perspective, as well as from the perspective of Social Sciences and Humanities.

As the problem of climate change becomes more urgent, countries are stepping up their rush towards net-zero emissions. As a consequence, there is widespread deployment of renewables, including the still nascent deployment of renewable energy communities in modern electricity systems, and the advent of active consumers, able to produce energy locally and actively manage their demand. New ideas about the ontology of energy systems, both in terms of their taxonomy and their interactions in the resulting energy ecosystem, are opening up new ways of thinking about energy systems.

This emerging concept is spearheading the transition from a centralised, supplier-centric structure to a more decentralised, consumer-centric scenario in the energy paradigm.

In this regard, idrECO proposes original solutions for management through digital technologies powered by computational intelligence, and to improve its flexibility through the use of battery energy storage systems oriented at RECs (REC-BESS).