RESCOOP MECISE is short for Renewable Energy Sources COOPeratives Mobilizing European Citizens to Invest in Sustainable Energy. As European citizens and local authorities often lack time, financial means and technical expertise to initiate the necessary energy renovations of their houses and public buildings, the potential for energy efficiency projects remains largely untapped. RESCOOP MECISE will develop an integrated and innovative approach that gives answer to this impeding challenge. By integrating both renewable energy and energy efficiency projects into one innovative investment scheme RESCOOP MECISE will elaborate a completely new financing format. The financing scheme will make European citizens, REScoops, local authorities, the European Investment Bank and other related investment funds partners into the transition towards a more sustainable society. Moreover RESCOOP MECISE will encourage citizens and local authorities to initiate deep energy renovation projects by providing them with personal assistance and technical expertise that now remains with the REScoops. The RESCOOP MECISE project will also provide a clear cut solution for the financing problem that REScoops face when they want to start up with their first project. By means of setting up a European fund for both renewable energy and energy efficiency projects or through the development of a financial facilitation service for REScoops the REScoop MECISE project will enhance the potential for more successful energy efficiency projects throughout Europe.

REScoop Plus built on the knowledge and network of the REScoop 20-20-20 project. An interesting additional observation made in the project was that members of supplying REScoops change their behaviour reducing final energy consumption and investing money to produce RESenergy. The aim of the REScoop PLUS is therefore to get a better understanding and foster this behavioural change. It will identify and measure the best practices, share their knowledge, improve their activities in in their citizen’s engagement and energy efficiency actions and disseminate them to other supplying REScoops in Europe. The objective of REScoop PLUS is to make REScoops in Europe go beyond their activities of producing and supplying energy and take up energy savings for their members as a new pillar in their organisation. The largest supplying energy REScoops in Europe have recently taken up this task in several experimental projects, with different rates of success for different measures and geographies. The aim is now to go beyond the experimental phase and create a toolkit with a range of best practice products like communication tools, ICT tools for better measurements or new business models that support energy savings of consumers/members by changing the behaviour of consumers that are ready for market uptake by REScoops to implement into their organisation in order to reduce the CO2 footprint of their members.

By 2050, 98 million Europeans could become prosumers by joining an energy community. The REScoopVPP project combines front-runner energy communities to create the most advanced community-driven smart building ecosystem for energy communities. The ecosystem consists of a Community-driven Flexibility Box (COFY-Box) acting as smart home controller, and a set of community tools to support energy services for aggregators, ESCO’s, BRP’s and suppliers of RES. The COFY-box will be the first truly open and collaborative building controller, based on existing open source home automation technology with more than 1.400 integrations. The COFY-box will be affordable and easy to install. Community tools will enable energy communities to become real-time asset operators by employing demand and production forecasting algorithms, a dynamic pricing module for implicit DR and an OpenADR-based explicit DR solution. REScoopVPP solutions will undergo a large-scale experimentation in Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and the UK. The project will improve EV, PV and electric battery control, and will especially focus on the intelligent integration of thermal storage and hybrid heating solutions, capable of shifting fossil fuel consumption from legacy DHW and heating equipment to flexible renewable heat. Further attention will be given to smart plug control and the integration of equipment based on emerging EU-standards. This will improve comfort, while not adversely affecting original functionalities, quality and lifetime of the equipment. The ecosystem of REScoopVPP has the potential to impact 375.000 customers 5 years after the project and thus trigger primary energy savings of 559 GWh/year and improve the SRI of houses by 2 steps on average. To make sure that the ecosystem is viable, REScoopVPP will establish a dedicated legal entity that can bring solutions to the market and provide citizens with a European, community-driven alternative.

FLEXCoop introduces an end-to-end Automated Demand Response Optimization Framework. It enables the realization of novel business models, allowing energy cooperatives to introduce themselves in energy markets under the role of an aggregator. It equips cooperatives with innovative and highly effective tools for the establishment of robust business practices to exploit their microgrids and dynamic VPPs as balancing and ancillary assets toward grid stability and alleviation of network constraints. Optimization in FLEXCoop applies to multiple levels. It spans local generation output, demand and storage flexibility, as well as the flexibility offered by EVs to facilitate maximum RES integration into the grid, avoidance of curtailment and satisfaction of balancing and ancillary grid needs. This is achieved via automated, human-centric demand response schemes with the participation of appropriately selected residential prosumers. To enhance prosumer acceptance, the FLEXCoop innovative services will feature non-intrusiveness, comfort and well-being preservation, non-violation of prosumer daily schedules as well as maximization of benefits through transparent and open participation in markets. It will also guarantee easy switching between DR service providers, vendor lock-in avoidance, customized DR service contracts and objective settlement and remuneration, thus establishing an energy democracy context and empowering prosumers to become active energy market players. FLEXCoop brings together a wide range of baseline technologies to build an open and interoperable DR optimization framework, including a fully-fledged tool suite for energy cooperatives (aggregators) and prosumers involved in the DR value chain, ensuring: (i) DR stakeholders empowerment and transformation into active market players, (ii) end-to-end interoperability between energy networks, energy management systems and devices and (iii) the realization of new business models for energy cooperatives.