The ACCEPT Energy Community Tools (ECTs) assists the energy community to participate actively in the energy transition, to offer benefits and services to its members and to assume different market roles.
The ECTs act as the intermediary between the ‘outside world’, consisting of the Energy Distribution System and the Energy Market, and the downstream assets within the community’s portfolio, including both prosumer- and district-level assets.
The ECTs component consists of Vertical Energy Community Tools (V-ECTs) and Horizontal Energy Community Tools (H-ECTs). The V-ECTs include the ESCo Tools, Aggregator Tools and Retailer tools as they aim to capture the different roles that can be undertaken by an energy community on the energy markets. The H-ECTS include the Virtual Power Plant Manager, the Demand Elasticity Estimator, the Energy Community Flexibility Manager and the P2P Supply Shadow Administrator. These tools are for managing the community internal requirements, focusing mainly on intra-community assets and transactions.
Part of the ECTs is also the front-end system, referred to herein as Energy Community Platform, which allows the community managers to visualise contextualised information on the performance of their community assets and the benefits and targets achieved to date by the community as a whole, but also by community members individually.