Community energy meets smart grids: Reviewing goals, structure, and roles in Virtual Power Plants in Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands

Summeren, Luc F.M. van; Wieczorek, Anna; Bombaerts, Gunter; Verbong, Gpj Geert

doi:10.1016/j.erss.2019.101415

Cited by 101 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…For example, using battery storage, homeowners with solar PV can generate "citizen utilities" that allow them to shift consumption or sell surplus directly to the community. Further research has identified how citizen energy communities might operate "community virtual power plants" that challenge the incumbent energy system and allow for more localized energy management and trading [85]. While citizen utilities and community microgrids may not replace the incumbent grid, they can increase efficiency and flexibility and reinforce some of the social bonds and environmental awareness often absent in current energy practices [86].…”

Section: Energy Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen Science and Citizen Energy Communities: A Systematic Review and Potential Alliances for SDGs

2020

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Citizen science and citizen energy communities are pluralistic terms that refer to a constellation of methods, projects, and outreach activities; however, citizen science and citizen energy communities are rarely, if ever, explicitly aligned. Our searches for “citizen science” and “energy” produced limited results and “citizen science” and “energy communities” produced zero. Therefore, to outline a future direction of citizen science, its potential alliances with energy communities, and their collaborative contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals, we performed a systematic literature review and analysis of “public participation” and “energy communities” using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRIMSA) guidelines. The results show four pathways through which current public participation in energy communities might be more explicitly aligned with citizen science projects: benefits and values, energy practices, intermediaries, and energy citizenship. Each of these pathways could engage citizen scientists in qualitative and quantitative research and increase scientific literacy about energy systems. Our call for citizen science to supplement current forms of participation builds from the “ecologies of participation” framework, itself an extension of co-productionist theories of science and technology studies. We conclude with a discussion of affordances and barriers to the alliances between citizen science and energy communities and their potential contributions to SDGs 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, 13: Climate Action, and 17: Partnerships for the Goals.

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Section: Energy Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen Science and Citizen Energy Communities: A Systematic Review and Potential Alliances for SDGs

2020

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“…by selling shares of the assets. To realize a good match between the local demand and local supply of energy the activities around a cVPP would furthermore include the use of ICT: VPP technology and an energy management system to enable demand response [1]. The scale and complexity of these technologies preferably would match with the local needs, ambitions, competencies and capacities.…”

Section: Activities Inspired By Community-energy Logicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The VPP technology would enable communities to explore new ways of organizing the generation and distribution of energy within their own community, for example, in a more distributed and more sustainable way, reflecting community values. Community energy projects follow a community logic [1]. With community logic we mean the rationale behind a project, reflecting diverse community needs and values; the role of the community in deciding about the distribution of benefits, costs and risks; it refers to models of community ownership of assets, the organization and/or the cVPP; it refers to active engagement of community members in governance and decision making; and it refers to the ambition to have a scale and level of complexity that matches with the needs, abilities and ambitions of community members.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community-Based Virtual Power Plants: Against All Odds?

Mourik¹,

Breukers²,

Summeren

et al. 2019

Sustainable Places 2019

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Based on a European project entitled “Community-based Virtual Power Plants’ (Interreg 2017–2010) this paper discusses opportunities for community energy projects—focusing on the example of community-based virtual power plants. Using a business model canvas as heuristic and the Dutch demonstration case as an example, we show how a business model following a community logic is unfeasible in practice. The current institutional context compels community based cVPP initiatives to partially abandon such community-based values, in order to be able to survive in the energy services market. It is concluded that more attention is needed for institutional change since the current institutional bias that hinders cVPP projects is also hindering a more inclusive energy transition.

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“…Thus, the current literature analyzes the real cases of VPPs. The international examples are in, e.g., United Kingdom [6], Denmark [7], Ireland [8], Greece [9], Germany [10], China [11], India [12], Australia [13], and South Korea [14]. The range of VPP functioning is wide.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Case Study on Data Mining Application in a Virtual Power Plant: Cluster Analysis of Power Quality Measurements

et al. 2021

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One of the recent trends that concern renewable energy sources and energy storage systems is the concept of virtual power plants (VPP). The majority of research now focuses on analyzing case studies of VPP in different issues. This article presents the investigation that is based on a real VPP. That VPP operates in Poland and consists of hydropower plants (HPP), as well as energy storage systems (ESS). For specific analysis, cluster analysis, as a representative technique of data mining, was selected for power quality (PQ) issues. The used data represents 26 weeks of PQ multipoint synchronic measurements for 5 related to VPP points. The investigation discusses different input databases for cluster analysis. Moreover, as an extension to using classical PQ parameters as an input, the application of the global index was proposed. This enables the reduction of the size of the input database with maintaining the data features for cluster analysis. Moreover, the problem of the optimal number of cluster selection is discussed. Finally, the assessment of clustering results was performed to assess the VPP impact on PQ level.

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Community energy meets smart grids: Reviewing goals, structure, and roles in Virtual Power Plants in Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands

Cited by 101 publications

References 45 publications

Citizen Science and Citizen Energy Communities: A Systematic Review and Potential Alliances for SDGs

Citizen Science and Citizen Energy Communities: A Systematic Review and Potential Alliances for SDGs

Community-Based Virtual Power Plants: Against All Odds?

A Case Study on Data Mining Application in a Virtual Power Plant: Cluster Analysis of Power Quality Measurements

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