The increasing electrification of heat and transport coupled with larger RESs deployment of decentralized RESs is disclosing new additional opportunities for demand response. However DR potential has been exploited so far to a very limited extent at end consumer residential level, due to technologies immaturity, regulatory fuzziness, distorted business framework preventing end consumers to capture an appropriate value. To cope with the above challenges, BRIGHT will leverage on a participatory co-creation process to bring individual consumers center stage to deliver a multi-layered community-centred cross-domain adaptable multi-timescale DR supporting framework which combines social-science-driven user experience design for user behavior motivations and monetary/non-monetary incentive design, Digital Twins models for improved consumer predictability, multi-layered P2P DLT/blockchain/smart contracts based semi-decentralized VPPs for capturing intra-community interaction dynamics, value stacking flexibility management algorithms and other AI data-driven energy and-non energy services at the interplay among energy (power, heat, gas), mobility, health (comfort), smart home (AAL, personal safety). The proposed approach and the underlying enablers will be deployed and validated in 4 demo-sites across 4 EU countries where around 1000 mostly residential consumers will be engaged along a variety of different community configurations (LEC, CEC, Virtual Energy Communities, Communities on the Move).

InterConnect envisages to contribute for the democratization of efficient energy management, through a flexible and interoperable ecosystem where demand side flexibility can be soundly integrated with effective benefits to end-users. In fact, over the last few years several projects and technology providers have come up with solutions that allow every energy user to have awareness and control over his appliances, but there has always been a major issue with interoperability. End-users should be able to choose and change their technology providers, without having to replace their installation, every time they feel this need and still be able to adopt sustainable behaviour and benefit from technological advances. In the energy sector, a steep move towards digital is occurring and becoming tremendously user-centric and market-driven. The system dimension is significant, as the number of energy service providers is increasing thanks to favourable regulatory environment and technology advancements for monitoring and control. This is the reason why this consortium integrates relevant partners from all the representative stakeholders in this new energy paradigm. Specific competences in ICT, IoT, energy, data science, software, were included and the full value chain, from R&D institutions, manufacturers, DSO, retailers, IT providers, and energy users is represented. To guarantee a higher Europe-wide impact, several relevant associations related with ICT and energy are also involved. To achieve a significant dimension, 7 large scale pilots, in different countries and with different end-users, are foreseen to guarantee representativeness and dimension in terms of number of appliances and services. The overarching objective of these pilots is to demonstrate a real digital market environment over electrical systems with significant amounts of DSF, reducing operational and investment costs that will benefit energy end-users and help EU achieve its energy efficiency objectives.