Simplifying customer energy manager solutions with RESONANCE

Welcome to the EU Energy Projects podcast, a podcast series from Enlid and France focusing on the clean energy transition for the European Union and the EU Commission funded energy projects that will help us achieve it. My name is Ereti Deradimou, I am the editor of the EU Energy Projects podcast and your host. Project Resonance aims to simplify the development of customer energy manager solutions for consumers and prosumers. By enabling demand side flexibility management and integrating smart appliances, Resonance promotes active participation in the energy ecosystem, offering cost efficient plug and play software for diverse sectors while ensuring security, privacy and collaboration through data marketplaces. Together with Markus Stamberger, the project's coordinator and UC Kiliander, the technical coordinator of the project, and my guests for this episode, we are going to dive into the project's main focus areas. UC, Markus, thank you very much for being here with me today. Thank you for the opportunity to join in the podcast. Can you now explain the main objectives of the Resonance project and how it aims to revolutionize the role of consumers and prosumers in the energy ecosystem? Let's start with you, Markus. Yes, our main objective is to use the customer energy manager to hide the heterogeneity of flexible assets that are provided by different sectors. We will provide a common semantic level interface for energy and flexibility market actors that make it possible to use flexibility in the different markets. What specific challenges do customer energy managers or CEMs address when it comes to demand side flexibility management? So the customer energy managers are basically software agents that automate energy and flexibility management in consumer premises. They have a dual role. So the first role is to optimize energy and flexibility locally in the buildings to maximize consumer benefits. For example, the customer energy manager or CEM can optimize the use of HVAC systems and EV charging while taking into account the local production from PVs, spot prices, electricity, poverty tariffs, and the goal is to minimize the total costs while still satisfying their consumer preferences. The idea is to make demand flexibility as easy as possible for the end users. Then the second role the CEM has is to provide the flexibility that it gathers from the buildings, from the consumer premises to the overall system balancing in a more explicit manner. So CEM needs to provide the aggregators with baseline load profiles and flexibility forecasts and then also be able to receive flexibility requests from the aggregators. To make this happen, there are of course many specific challenges on the technical level that we need to solve in the project. In the operability, it's a big challenge so that we can develop and deploy these solutions at a large scale in a cost-efficient manner and the other big challenge is related to the modeling and optimal control which need to be accurate and robust and also easily replicable to new sites with minimal human effort. So let's say these are the main things on the high level that we are dealing with in the project. It makes total sense. How does the CEM concept transform consumers from passive recipients to active participants in the energy system and even though it might sound a little bit obvious, what are the benefits of this shift? Yes, as you already mentioned, the customer energy manager is a software agent that offers the interoperability and makes it possible for the consumers to easily offer their resources as flexibility to the different aggregators and markets. There will be also different modeling techniques used so that it will be possible to forecast the behavior of the customers much better than now. And this will also help to have a predictable use of flexibility that can be planned with. Another I think important role in the project is that of smart appliances. So could you elaborate a little bit on their role and how model predictive control is used to optimize their functionality because this is also a thing that the end consumer will be very interested in, especially if it's plug-and-play. Basically the smart appliances are the source of flexibility and in the project we use the term in a broad manner, so basically meaning all kinds of flexible assets, all kinds of resources that can provide flexibility in buildings. In practice we focus on the most potential flexible assets or smart appliances, which are the heating and HVAC systems and then EV charging. We also cover other assets, but these are the main things we focus on. For example with heating we are currently ongoing rapid transformation of the heating sector. A lot of new heat pumps are being deployed in EU, which then creates a lot of potential demand flexibility. But it's very difficult to accurately know how these heating systems behave. So that's why we develop solutions for model predictive control and forecasting. We try to combine the best parts of machine learning and physics based modeling to create accurate models, heating systems so that we can then use these models to optimize and plan, like I mentioned locally, how the asset, how the smart appliance, how the heat pump should behave and then also taking the big picture, the global network power grid into account and traditional rule-based approaches are not good anymore, so that's why we develop new solutions based on this modeling and model predictive control. Did you know that Enlid has another podcast? The Energy Transitions podcast is a broad-ranging bi-weekly podcast about the people accelerating the energy transition in Europe and beyond. You can find it on Spotify, Apple or wherever you enjoy your podcasts. You mentioned machine learning with physics-based modeling, right? How does this combination contribute to more accurate and efficient modeling of smart appliances, like in a nutshell? Yeah, so the key idea is that both of these methods have their own advantages. So it makes sense to combine the best parts to create models that are accurate and robust and easily replicable. In a nutshell, the machine learning works very well when we have a lot of data available, which is typical for the baseline consumption of buildings, let's say. But then when we start to control the buildings in a new way, it can be difficult for machine learning-based approaches to focus what will happen. The physics of heating systems are well known, but it's very time-consuming to model them in detail, so it makes sense to take some parts of the physics and embed them into the machine learning model and have models that are accurate, robust, and easily replicable. This is, in summary, the idea. I would like to circle a little bit back to the plug-and-play option, let's say. You guys said that the Resonance Software framework supports plug-and-play development and rapid deployment of standard compliance and solutions, but how do you do that across different customer sectors? This sounds like a bit of a pickle there. Is that true, Markus? Yes, that's true, but we are tackling this challenge by offering three different service catalogs. One for the resource managers, one for the customer energy managers, and one for the aggregation services, so that the different stakeholders can select the services they need to make the flexibility management possible, so if they are, for example, having gaps, they can fill them with just selected services. Then, of course, we provide also within the framework configuration and deployment tools that are needed for customizing these agents for the specific use case. The key idea is that there is a lot of heterogeneity in the sector side and in the smart appliance side, but we build on common solutions, common standards then in the middle so that we can reuse many parts of the framework, although we might need to implement some specific adapters to some specific assets. In some sector, then most of the framework, most of the architecture may be in the same level. The interface between the resource managers and same as the interface between the customer energy managers and the aggregation platforms, those we can reuse, and many of the tools we can reuse, so this makes it more plug-and-play, more easily replicable, than very custom solutions to specific sectors, so we can reuse stuff or solutions across these sectors. A very important focus point for any software solution out there is security. How does resonance ensure trust, security, and privacy management for consumers, particularly regarding identity management and authorizations? For that, we use the well-known data space concept, and that has a very efficient usage control so that the users can very specifically select which data is being shared and which is not to be shared, and then we rely on state-of-the-art encryption methods from the internet, and that together enables the security and privacy for the end users. Very enough, but then how does it encourage collaboration between technology providers, service providers, data providers, if everybody has, let's say, a very specific area of working? We have the underlying standards as you see set, but on top we have also the data space concept which is more lightweight and easy to deploy, so with that we are hoping to encourage the different stakeholders to more collaborate and exchange data among each other. When it comes to data, however, there are different rules and regulations throughout Europe, right, the European Union, the various states. How do you tackle the problem? We have, for example, ethical experts on board that are taking care that all our doings are GDPR compliant, and then we have also security experts on board, and we have a data management plan, and through that we are ensuring that we are all following the national laws, but mainly the European-level laws. There have been a lot of projects in this podcast that are focusing on demand-side flexibility, and I would like to ask you, Markus, where do you see the fine line between collaboration and competition when it comes to these projects? I think nowadays we see really a lot of collaboration, actually, this is also very nicely fostered by the bridge initiative, so earlier I think there was also a lack of transparency, projects just did not know what the others are doing. This has gotten now much better, and then regarding the standards, I think you can give more details, but I see that way that the standards are there already, and we are trying to implement according to those standards and make best use of them, so I also do not see any competition on the standardization process itself. Markus said for the projects, I think the competition is mainly on the kind of when we try to apply for funding, but then when we get the funding, there is quite good cooperation. Even now in Resonance we are actually organizing a common pilot with one of the sister projects that was funded from the same goal, so Global Flex, we will have a common pilot together, so there is really no competition during the project runtime. I would like to ask you one final question, and I would like to divide it in two. You will answer as technical coordinator, and you, Markus, as the overall project coordinator. If you could ask one thing from the European Commission, from DGNR, for example, or Digiconnect, to help you when it comes to regulation, to help make your lives easier when you work on your project, what would that be from a technical point of view and from an overall point of view? I would like the technical first. Yeah, good question. I think the main challenge related to regulation is related to the standard, so although the standardization is ongoing, there is still a lot of them for different sectors and different smart appliance domains, and also both on the resource side, so in the buildings, then on the network, on the markets, and this can lead into a situation with a lot of silos. I would like to have a more clear, coherent approach for the standardization, trying to break these silos between different domains and sectors, and also having the standardization regulation bodies to cooperate more. Maybe this is, I don't think it's a big problem, but this is something I see that there's a lot of heterogeneity, a lot of different layers also in the standardization field. Yeah, rest assured, this is a wish from many technical coordinators and developers that I've discussed with, so it makes total sense. Marcus, from your point of view? Yes, I see also fragmentation maybe on a different level. We have pilots in six member states and there are still substantial differences in the legislation, so in some countries they are leveraging on the network tariffs, for example, which is not allowed in others, and here I would wish for alignment also, first on content, but also on the timings, if there would be a synchronization and an alignment and from the content that would be very beneficial. Thank you very much for this interesting conversation and I'm wishing you all the best with the resonance in the future. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. You've been listening to the EU Energy Projects podcast, a podcast brought to you by Enlite and Friends. You can find us on Spotify, Apple and the Enlite World website. Just hit subscribe and you can access our other episodes too. I'm Aledita Radimu. Thank you for joining us.