The pilot aggregates three mixed residential, tertiary and industrial sites in Spain, which include diverse electric, thermal and hydrogen generation and distribution systems:

The Swiss pilot site consists of 3 energy communities located mainly in residential suburban areas, about 6 kms from Lugano.
“Lugaggia Innovation Community” was implemented in 2018 to optimise the use of local solar energy in the district of Lugaggia. The community, which hosts about 75 residents, consists of 18 single-family houses and a kindergarten. Local production is based on PV generation backed by a district battery to store the energy produced for the night hours. For flexibility purposes a considerable number of heat pumps and electric boilers is present.
“Arena Innovation Community” consists of 105 residents spread over 11 buildings, a public swimming pool, and a football field. Three large photovoltaic systems are used to generate local renewable energy. In addition, the community has a district heating service based on a biomass plant and a V2G EV charging station to provide car sharing service.
“Garamè District” is a community that planned to bundle 7 single-family houses with 25 residents, which generate a large surplus of PV energy during summer. The idea behind the community is to create a seasonal storage leveraging the nearby hydroelectric power plant as a virtual storage facility to store energy during summer and use it during winter.

The objective of this pilot is to enable energy and flexibility sharing across communities. A business model will be described in order to incentivize participants to collaborate and share their energy and optimize their consumption. For this we will maximize the exploitation of local RES assets (solar), as well as storage in batteries and their integration with e-mobility systems.

Flexibility in production (batteries) and in consumption (e-mobility, batteries) will be an important driver in this pilot project. Any surplus energy will be shared across sites and community members and with the grid, leveraging multi-stakeholder interactions through an open marketplace for energy/flexibility trading.

Finally, this pilot site will demonstrate cross-country interactions, which will in practice be cross-provincial, thereby showing the positive impact such an approach can deliver. The two sites are: the Brussels Brico Retail Community in Brussels and the ENBRO Community where 100 residential installations are geographically spread across Belgium.