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).

AI spreading in the energy sector is expected to dramatically reshape energy value chain in the next years, by improving business processes performance, while increasing environmental sustainability, strengthening social relationships and propagating high social value among citizens. However, uncertain business cases, fragmented regulations, standards immaturity and low-technical SMEs workforce skills barriers are actually hampering the full exploitation of AI along the energy value chain. I-NERGY will deliver: (i) Financing support through Open Calls to third parties SMEs for new energy use cases and technology building blocks validation, as well as for developing new AI-based energy services, while fully aligning to AI4EU service requirements and strengthening the SME competitiveness on AI for energy; (b) An open modular framework for supporting AI-on-Demand in the energy sector by capitalising on state-of-the-art AI, IoT, semantics, federated learning, analytics tools, which leverage on edge-level AI-based cross-sector multi-stakeholder sovereignty and regulatory preserving interoperable data handling. I-NERGY aims at evolving, scaling up and demonstrating innovative AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) Energy Analytics Applications and digital twins services that will be validated along 9 pilots, which: (a) Span over the full energy value chain, ranging from optimised management of grid and non-grid RES assets, improved efficiency and reliability of electricity networks operation, optimal risk assessment for energy efficiency investments planning, optimising local and virtual energy communities involvement in flexibility and green energy marketplaces; (b) Delivers other energy and non-energy services to realise synergies among energy commodities (district heating, buildings) and with non-energy sectors (i.e. e-mobility, personal safety/security, AAL), and with non- or low-technical domains end users (i.e. elderly people).