The ACCEPT Vertical Energy Community Tools aim to support different business roles which can be undertaken by an energy community, in particular the role of the ESCo, the aggregator and the retailer. In different ACCEPT Use Cases, the aggregator, the ESCo and retailer tools communicate with different horizontal Energy Community tools to request different services (e.g., increase community self-consumption, Explicit DR requests, etc.)
ESCo tool: Trained models will provide energy production and consumption forecasts tailored to the profiles of the buildings and the occupants. The various devices and controllable assets, both privately and community owned, will schedule their operation accordingly. The provision of the optimization services towards the community members can be achieved by activating different business mechanisms in the form of smart contract enabled Smart Level Agreements. This is a direct way to enhance transparency and increase trust between the members of the community.
Aggregator tool: in the context of ACCEPT, the products in scope for the aggregator are explicit Demand-Response based. The aggregator toolset within ACCEPT acts as the intermediary between the DSO and the downstream pool of community assets, either district or building-level assets. It is able to receive requests from the DSO and translate them into a set of optimisation and clustering criteria used by the Horizontal Energy Community Tools for carrying out the actions necessary for the provision of a response by the Aggregator to the DSO. Remuneration of the services is performed based on smart contracts agreed between the two parties.
Retailer tools: The Energy community operating as a Retailer aims to optimally deliver energy to the energy community members and to sell the excess energy back to the grid. The community is considered as a single entity that has either an energy surplus or a deficit. By undertaking the role of the retailer, it can trade this surplus or deficit with an external retailer or directly at the wholesale market. . Therefore, to operate in optimal conditions and to avoid budgeting issues, it is necessary to accurately forecast the energy needs of the community and to calculate the energy tariff in a way that it will be competitive, but also profitable at the same time. This is carried out by the retailer tool. The Retailer itself has also a dedicated account and an active node on the Blockchain Network and transactions are performed through smart contracts.