Energy communities add resilience and sustainability to future energy ecosystem

The global energy consumption is continuously increasing, and new solutions for more efficient energy use and distribution are inevitable. Energy communities are one important step on the path towards carbon neutral energy and demand response in European Union.

Energy communities are an opportunity for citizens and other market players to team up and organize collective energy investments. In practice, for example a housing company that decides to install solar panels and then share the produced energy among its shareholders and sell the excess energy to the grid, forms an energy community.

Energy communities promote not only sustainable use of renewable energy, but also new forms of sharing the benefits within the community: for example, housing companies, industrial areas or city districts can form communities, where the members benefit from common energy production or joint purchasing.

Energy communities are promoted in Espoo

For energy communities to become widely accepted and attractive for big crowds, they need to be easily accessible and fair. Innovative technology solutions and business models make energy communities possible, but they only become reality with the support of everyday energy users.

Energy communities are promoted in the Implementation Pathway for Environments that Accelerate Sustainable Growth KETO-project. KETO is a joint project with the city of Espoo, VTT, Aalto University and Omnia. The goals of the work include creating alternative energy community models and concepts that fit to city environments and plans for implementing them at Otaniemi and Kera.

As one part of the project, three students from Aalto University worked as research assistants studying the energy communities from different perspectives.

New findings and familiar grounds

Each student had an individual viewpoint to the topic, and the project offered both familiar grounds and new learnings.

In her work, Jasmin Jaanto developed credit calculation models that enable fair and efficient share of profits within energy communities. Jasmin focused on the theme already in her bachelor’s thesis, but the recent changes in legislation expanded the opportunities of energy communities in Finland and offered and excellent opportunity to continue with the subject.

Yue Zuo studied the role of energy storages inside the energy community by observing battery, electrochemical storage and thermal energy storage technologies and developed a tool to simulate the battery use. She also had a solid background for the topic, as she got familiar with the legislation and policies related to energy communities in different European countries in a previous development project.

Ruqian Zhang, for the change, entered the topic from the perspective of smart buildings and technologies that enable them. In her work she focused on the hybrid heating system and its optimization in a small energy community, using Aalto Works building as an example.

All three agree, that the work has definitely been interesting, and in some respects quite surprising. The things, that seemed difficult at the beginning, ended up being quite simple instead, and things that were not expected to be that difficult were forming problems at some cases.

For an example Yue mentioned, that getting data from actual use-cases sounds simple, but it is actually very difficult to access. The extent of calculation needed, and finding the right tools also caused occasional headaches. Not all of the surprising elements were bad though – learning how to utilize Excel macro features to tackle multifold problems made both Jasmin and Ruqian happy.

How does the future of energy communities look like?

The young professionals share a vision of the bright energy community future – it is evident, that energy industry and prosumer solutions will continue evolving. All three would gladly see themselves somehow involved with the theme, either as a researcher, PhD student or industry professional. The project opened new views on how energy communities are studied and observed outside the academia, and further sparked interest towards the topic and research.  The experience also gave a perspective to project work, and how the cooperation could be improved in the future.

More information:

Jasmin Jaanto: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/116353(external link, opens in a new window)

Ruqian Zhang: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/117112(external link, opens in a new window)

Yue Zuo: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/117118(external link, opens in a new window)