DEDALUS

Project summary:

In the European Union (EU), households (namely the residential sector) represented 27,4% of the final energy consumption. The residential loads often contribute significantly to seasonal and daily peak demand. To support this variation, utilities companies need to increase their generation, to avoid interruptions in power supply. Generally, 20% of the power generation capacity is latently available to meet the peak demand that occurs for approximately 5% of the time.

Historically, matching electricity supply and demand was relatively straightforward, with large and controllable power plants on the one hand and relatively easy to predict demand on the other. But in recent years, this scenario is starting to change, due to a number of reasons: (i) The use of smaller, variable and less predictable decentralised renewable generation is increasing, affecting directly the energy matrix; (ii) Europe attempts to disentangle its demand from Russian gas and fuels (with a looming supply gap for the coming winter), while keeping up with its decarbonisation targets; (iii) Climate change, and the resulting temperature changes (like the recent European heat waves), affect electricity markets both on the demand and the supply sides.

Matching electricity supply and demand at all times is becoming more challenging and the electricity system needs more flexibility. A flexible consumption (i.e. demand following supply) could - next to energy efficiency as ‘first fuel’ - play an important role in the residential sector. Residential Demand Response (DR) can reduce the need for fossil fuel power plants and help integrate renewable energy onto the electric grid by providing increased stability and management. The overall vision of DEDALUS is to design, develop and demonstrate SSH-driven multi-value energy carrier-agnostic DR ecosystem, tailored to optimise and manage automated DR in residential buildings. We combine leading-edge ICTs technologies [IoT, AI, DLT/blockchain, edge computing big data] with social/behavioural dimension, and with sharing economy and value stacking governance and business models.

Project objectives:

The overarching goal is to deploy a social, technological and business framework, aimed to: (i) facilitate and scale up residential energy consumers massive participation to DR; (ii) adapt to a variety of different mono-carrier (electricity, heat) or multi-carrier synergetic scenarios (electricity vs heat, electricity vs natural gas), with a view to take into full consideration synergies and interaction among the participating energy commodities. DEDALUS’ objectives based on the layer are the following:

• Social layer: Designate socio-economic enablers, which leverage on a combination of qualitative and quantitative SSH-driven research and inspiring principles from Design Thinking methodologies, for engaging residential energy consumers in DR at building-level through appropriate design of beyond-financial DR incentives, such as the personal comfort.
• Technology layer, consisting of:
  • A data-driven stack of technology enablers to enable smart loads residential appliances into DR-ready flexible ones. It includes: (i) technology adaptation, harmonisation and alignment of most prominent DR interoperability efforts and protocols, (ii) privacy preserving blockchain-based solutions technology enablers aimed to support trusted data governance and sovereignty and facilitate energy flexibility data sharing as the necessary backbone to deploy effective algorithms and services for residential DR.
  • Novel multi-value data-driven DR flexibility management services and Building/District Digital Twins, exploiting available potential at different levels of flexibility aggregation (apartment-level, buildinglevel, district-level and multiple buildings within a virtual building cluster, i.e. not geographically bounded buildings).
• Business Layer, where new building-centered DR business models will be designed and validated, while combining: (i) Building-level DR service offering cost reduction through larger socialisation of the DR infrastructure (and DR-ready device costs deployment) than possible at individual apartment level; (ii) revenue increases from service bundling and/or cross-commodity services (electricity vs heat) and/or cross-value chain services (energy vs healthcare/comfort, ageing) may represent significant enablers.

NTUA Role:

NTUA is the Pilot Coordinator, also leading the following tasks and activities:

• Demonstration activities management
• Support customers segmentation and clustering of buildings
• Methodology development for estimating the potential flexibility that may be offered through heterogeneous multi-energy flexible loads