Living Energy: A living lab for smart energy solutions

The Living Energy community helps reveal real energy consumption habits in Portugal while co- creating new smart energy products and services solutions.

Imagine being part of a community of explorers, eager to actively shape and drive the energy transition.

Living Energy comprises ‘living buildings’ – residential, educational, and service-oriented – designed to study real-world energy use and preferences.

It includes 93 homes in Portugal, where participants share real time energy consumption data with the Smart Energy Lab through room controls and sensors linked to a cloud-based digital platform, covering various building types, energy sources, load profiles and occupancy patterns.

Living Energy also participates in European projects like Enershare, which explores energy sharing and data-driven services for resilient, sustainable communities. It offers a dynamic environment for validating solutions and use cases developed by these projects.

The features and capacities of Living Energy

The Living Energy community consists of over 90 explorers monitoring nearly 800 appliances, contributing to over 600MWh of energy consumption and generating 540 million data points. Additionally, PV systems in 17 homes have produced 73MWh to date.

Living Energy is more than just a technical tool; it’s a social platform that fosters community and collaboration. Residents and stakeholders actively engage in co-creating and testing smart energy solutions.

The living lab also collaborates with key players in the energy ecosystem, including utilities, aggregators, regulators and policymakers, all of whom benefit from the community’s insights and feedback.

The value of Living Energy lies in its ability to generate rich, diverse data that reflects real-life behaviour and preferences of residents, as well as the performance and impact of smart energy technologies and services.

This data is invaluable for the Enershare project and other European initiatives aimed at developing and demonstrating innovative solutions for the energy transition.

By leveraging Living Energy as a living lab, these projects can validate and refine their solutions in a realistic, dynamic environment, evaluating their technical, economic, social and environmental viability and scalability.

Living Energy showcases the future of energy as a platform where smart energy solutions are developed, tested and improved in collaboration with end-users and stakeholders. It collects, analyses and leverages energy data to create value-added services and applications.

Living Energy is a driving force in the energy transition.

Be part of our community and contribute to the energy transition by discovering how to optimise energy use.