RESCHOOL – Unlocking the potential of energy communities

Purpose and goal

RESCHOOL is the short project name for "Strategies and tOOls for Incentivization and management of flexibility in Energy Communities with distributed Resources". The RESCHOOL project aims to increase the active participation of communities in energy markets, enhancing and facilitating the management and trading of flexibility in cooperation with sectoral players.

The RESCHOOL project consortium congregates the necessary competence and critical mass to ensure the achievement of the project goals and it brings together 16 partners from 7 European countries and 4 pilot communities (incl. one in Stockholm, Sweden).

Challenge

Currently, the energy sector is responsible for 72% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, this situation calls for a rapid and effective decarbonization of all sectors. Reaching the sustainability targets negotiated under the EU’s Green Deal requires facing the green transition towards clean energy by increasing the share of renewables and the efficient use of energy.

However, actions and policies of national governments are largely insufficient, and a big responsibility falls on citizens and local stakeholders. A more active role and direct participation of consumers (prosumers) in the energy value energy chain is needed; and this requires a collaborative and aggregated actuation. Moreover, EU Member States need to reduce its dependence of imported energy resources, which implies a significant transformation to manage the flexibility required by an increase of local renewable energy sources.

Solution

To support this transition, the Clean Energy for all Europeans package (CEP) was introduced. Its goal is to improve the functioning and design of Europe’s energy markets and systems, making them smarter, more decentralized and flexible, so that they can better integrate higher amounts of renewable energy. As part of CEP, new market actors called “active customers/consumers and citizens” and “energy communities” are being established.

RESCHOOL focuses on empowering energy communities as relevant energy actors in the energy value chain, not only as collective self-consumers but also as flexibility providers and prosumers. A significant aggregation of heterogeneous energy assets that includes production (e.g. solar PV, Power-to-X, combined heat and power CHP), storage (e.g. batteries, thermal) and controllable loads (e.g. shiftable loads, heat pumps, smart EV charging, etc.) offers enormous potential and opens the participation of energy communities as significant actors in demand-side management (DSM) programmes.

Expected impact/benefit

Energy communities focus on making a positive impact on the environment by using local renewable energy sources and by empowering citizens to act. RESCHOOL strives to contribute to energy communities participating on a level playing field in functioning electricity markets and engage in individual and collective self-consumption (or “prosumption”), by investing in local renewables and other clean energy technologies, and then consume, store, or sell the energy they generate.