Project ENPOWER: Unlocking a consumer-centric energy system

The ENPOWER project represents a comprehensive and innovative approach to transforming the European energy system by leveraging social sciences and humanities methodologies, advanced ICT tools, and interactive frameworks. Focusing on activating consumers and fostering community-level engagement, this project aims to turn passive energy users into proactive energy citizens.

The transition to a consumer-centric European energy system faces significant social, technological, and business challenges.

The social front needs to enhance energy literacy among citizens, enabling them to understand how the energy market works and how to participate. This includes providing tools and methodologies that raise awareness and allow consumers to manage their energy usage effectively, potentially reducing their energy bills and carbon footprint. However, existing incentive mechanisms are underdeveloped, lacking the ability to adequately reward consumers, especially households and SMEs, for their active participation, particularly non-financial benefits such as environmental improvements and social cohesion.

The technological front lacks digital tools and frameworks to facilitate the planning and development of cross-commodity and cross-sector energy communities. This includes the need for better data-sharing mechanisms to enhance transparency, trust, and real-time feedback between consumers and utilities.

On the business front, there is a need for innovative business models that can balance private and social benefits, particularly through shared ownership structures and community-centred aggregation. The regulatory and market frameworks must evolve to accommodate these new roles and ensure the integration of decentralised energy systems that are cost-efficient, and maximise system-wide benefits.

ENPOWER focuses on activating consumers and encouraging community-level aggregation to enhance local and system-wide energy efficiency while ensuring security for the energy supply. This strategy employs a co-creative methodology that involves communities and citizens connecting them directly to the energy market.

By fostering informed collaboration and co-creation the project aims to support a sustainable and equitable future, aligning with ambitious energy and climate goals. The ENPOWER project will develop and demonstrate a comprehensive social, technological, and business framework through six pilots, enabling the transition of individual consumers into active participants in the energy system.
The ENPOWER approach incorporates SSH-based methodologies alongside cutting-edge technologies, utilising a mix of qualitative and quantitative research inspired by Design Thinking. This aims to engage and support consumers and prosumers throughout the forming and developing of energy communities.

The technological layer features an Energy Data Space-compliant digital backbone, designed to facilitate consumer and community-level data-driven engagement while ensuring privacy and data sovereignty. This includes tools and services for planning, engaging, and optimising consumer activation (AI consumer clustering and segmentation algorithms), managed through interoperable demand response (DR) systems. These tools will empower consumers to get familiar with and control their energy usage.

Lastly, as for the business layer, we will design and validate new market roles and hybrid business models across the energy value chain, incorporating private and public elements. This layer focuses on creating a sharing economy framework that benefits all stakeholders, ensuring a fair distribution of the value created within these new energy systems.

The ENPOWER project aims to achieve significant impacts across scientific, economic, technological, and societal dimensions. On the scientific front, discoveries will consist of interactive decision support tools for energy community planning, finer-grained learning data models, data-driven energy services and Digital Twins for consumers and community self-consumption optimisation and aggregated flexibility management by leveraging on the availability of a large share of assets and interoperability.

Find out more about:
EU-funded energy projects

Additionally, the Social Science framework leverages a combination of deliberative citizen engagement methodology, intersectionality, co-creation, experimental scenario-based research, and Design Thinking methodologies, to bring energy and prosumers centre stage in the energy markets.

On the economic front, implementing the ENPOWER approach is expected to achieve a 13-15% reduction in energy bills for activated energy consumers and a 15% increase in energy efficiency. From a technological perspective, the efforts will harmonise and extend existing automation-oriented standards, such as the Family of IEC standards, and business DR standards like OpenADR2.0, and ontologies such as SAREF and languages like EFI. The aim is to boost energy data sharing by 45% among active consumers within five years and introduce ten new data-driven services to enhance consumer activation and market participation.

On the societal front, our project is set to create, set up, or upscale and replicate 30-35 energy communities within five years from the project start date. The aim is to engage over 1500 consumers and activate more than 1000 of them, achieving a 40% average yearly increase in the share of consumer energy market participation via energy communities. Additionally, the plan is to engage over 500 active consumers in automated demand response (DR) and achieve a 15-20% reduction in carbon emissions in the areas covered by the six project pilots, thanks to the increased decentralised management of energy infrastructures.

The project's multi-faceted strategy addresses key challenges across social, technological, and business dimensions promoting energy literacy, enhancing data sharing, and developing new business models. Through its ambitious goals and pilot projects, ENPOWER is set to achieve significant impacts, including reductions in energy bills, increased energy efficiency, and the establishment of numerous energy communities. Ultimately, ENPOWER seeks to create a sustainable, equitable, consumer-centric energy future.