The ACCEPT Horizontal-Energy Community Tools support all market role specific functionalities of the Energy Community Platform (i.e., aggregator, retailer and ESCo). They consist of four main components:
The Virtual Power Plant (VPP) Manager is responsible for deciding on the optimal clustering of available assets of the community-level portfolio (VPP formulation and configuration) based on dynamic information received from the aggregator, retailer or ESCo tools. This dynamic information will refer to the optimisation context and scenarios required by each actor at a given time to cover community and/or grid needs.
The Demand Elasticity Estimator is responsible for estimating the optimal pricing signal at which prosumers within a community are most likely to respond to and provide flexibility services.
The Energy Community Flexibility Manager is the core community-level optimisation engine responsible for receiving optimisation requests from the aggregator, retailer and ESCo tools and translating them into certain flexibility /DR requests for specific prosumers and assets within the appropriately configured VPP. The responsibility of the specific component includes also the dispatch of such flexibility/DR requests to all relevant prosumers and assets within the community portfolio.
The P2P Supply Shadow Administrator is a tool that will stimulate community optimization through price signals. Taking into account implicit flexibility requests, electricity demand and supply within the community and the overall self-optimization strategy of the community, it will provide price signals to the prosumers in order to steer consumption.
The Horizontal-Energy Communities Tools are also responsible for collecting all asset (both at building- and district-level) information (static and dynamic), as well as all flexibility forecasts generated by other ACCEPT solution components.