• The project demonstrates the activation and orchestration of flexibility of every type, power, energy consumption and availability to compensate volatile availability of renewable energy sources.
• Dynamic tariffs provide financial incentive for flexibility, to activate and integrate customers as consumers and prosumers into the energy system. While conventional market approaches rely on negotiations and schedules for energy exchange in the future, the SoLAR technology deduces prices in real-time directly out of grid state. This way, correct prices to maintain balance and prevent grid congestion are derived at any time, while minimizing effort for market transactions.
• The demonstrated technology represents a paradigm shift and has potential to boost the energy system transition. The technology is not only simple and cost effective, but solves upcoming problems of stability, resiliency, privacy and cyber security.
• Goal of the project was to demonstrate the feasibility of the technology. Moreover, the partners worked on concepts, how to integrate the technology into the energy system and how a transition roadmap could look like.

The project set out to address a number of objectives:

• To design a replicable, local energy market model which can help deliver future community energy schemes
• To deliver savings to consumers while providing wider community benefits
• To demonstrate the efficacy of a peer-to-peer local trading platform
• To demonstrate the application of blockchain in enabling local energy markets
• To conduct research on the key drivers and enablers for consumers to engage into a local energy market based on peer-to-peer trading
• To assess the impact of community self-consumption and peer-to-peer energy trading schemes on energy salience and engagement with energy and energy services
• To test consumer engagement and response in a peer to peer energy trading trial and provide robust evidence outputs for government and industry

Xavier Mamo, Director of Research & Development at EDF Energy:

“At EDF Energy, we are committed to making energy easier for our customers and unlocking the benefits that new technologies are bringing to the sector.

“By collaborating with our partners and using block chain technology, this project in Brixton aims to show how small communities in dense urban areas could benefit from a low carbon and local energy system in a new and transformative way.”

Throughout the CommUNITY project, numerous hurdles were discovered. Below will detail some key lessons learned and take away messages for other projects.

This project provided trial participants with electricity clamps to provide access to their electricity meter data due to the unavailability of smart meter data. This alternative is not scalable, and the use of smart meter data would be necessary for a large-scale deployment to be successful.

However, when smart meter data is to become available, accessing and using this data may prove difficult due to data privacy risks for participants. A successful P2P energy trading will rely on successful use of privacy enhancing technologies so that sensitive smart meter data is handled in a secure and privacy-preserving manner.

A public blockchain does not comply with the EU GDPR regulation including the `right to erasure’ allowing participants the ability to have their information deleted upon request. In addition, its use within a live environment imposes limitations that affect both analytics and user experience. For instance, analytics within the trial required retrieving all trades within a given market period. As the chain grows, this search becomes increasingly slower, such that additional information must be stored to efficiently limit the search space.

In practice, data will not always be available for all participants during each market period. A simple equipment failure or the data transmission network having an outage will result in ’data blackouts’ for participants. Handling these blackouts will be key to a robust deployment of a P2P market.

The CommUNITY project aimed at enhancing the consumption of local low-carbon energy among residents, while reducing their overall energy costs. This initiative facilitated residents’ ownership in a communal solar photovoltaic (PV) system installed on their block’s rooftop. It empowered residents to use, store, and directly trade electricity generated from solar panels within their community.

The project was also anticipated to demonstrate to broader society how small communities in densely populated urban areas can benefit from a low-carbon and locally sourced energy system in an innovative and transformative manner by implementing blockchain technology to facilitate peer-to-peer energy trading among residents.

The project achieved its goals by providing residents access to electricity produced by rooftop solar panels, allowing them to share or sell surplus energy. This setup not only led to reduced electricity expenses for the community members but also showcased the potential benefits of innovative and transformative technologies in the energy sector, particularly the viability of blockchain for system deployment.

Following the success of its initial phase, the CommUNITY project progressed to a three-month trial second phase which was named the Urban Energy Club project (also called “CommUNITY+” by DEF). At this stage, the project incorporated components of energy storage and network flexibility, where UK Power Networks (UKPN) was invited to participate. A communal battery with a capacity of 10kW/20kWh was installed and connected to the existing 37kWh solar PV system in December 2020, enhancing the ability of residents to utilise solar energy more effectively, especially during the evening.

In 2021, residents of the building were included in a trial with the Urban Energy Club project, co-managed by Repowering London, EDF, and UKPN, to experiment with how residents could contribute to the local electricity grid by providing flexible power services from the communal battery to UKPN.

The primary objective of this second phase was to create economic empowerment of residents and the local community by allowing them to participate in the flexibility market and derive income by selling flexibility to UKPN. This phase is also intended to benefit the local electricity network by providing flexible power services to balance supply and demand. Additionally, the consortium expected that the experiences and insights gained from the project would help them to understand how domestic, and local energy markets can interact with the grid and thus guide them in the design and development of future services.

The project reported significant achievements. The trial resulted in savings of £7.50 on monthly electricity bills for residents from using the solar energy generated and selling flexibility to UKPN. Stored clean solar energy has provided 42% of household electricity consumption on average.

Not only did the project deliver an economic advantage, but it also provided an important social benefit for the community by offering people who live in flats the opportunity to engage in solar energy production. Previously, these individuals were excluded from self-producing renewable energy.

Repowering London, one of the project’s developers, highlighted that what the company learned from the project has already been used to inform new ventures and encouraged the company to support local energy and community-scale renewable energy initiatives.