INSIEME

INSIEME: Powering Europe’s Digital and Green Energy Future

Europe’s transition to renewable and sustainable - yet volatile – energy sources has led to an increasingly participative and distributed landscape of actors placing challenges onto our energy infrastructure. In comparison to a controllable number of larger generation units connected to the networks, today’s electricity is increasingly generated by many smaller-scale prosumers, with most of the energy transition assets - such as renewables, EVs, heat pumps or batteries – connected at distribution level. Nowadays, innovative and participative tools are available to prosumers, helping to keep costs under control or increase revenues. Energy communities and energy sharing are on the rise, whilst markets for balancing and local services are being established, allowing new service providers to foster security of supply and stable infrastructures. At the same time, distribution system operators – in former days mainly responsible to connect and measure customers – are required to increase observability and respond to operational challenges in undertaking congestion management and voltage control. Pressure on electricity networks, among the world’s most mission-critical infrastructures, are further aggravated by drastic increases in demand that is due to electrification of sectors such as transport and heating.

It is therefore of utmost importance that authorities and involved stakeholder groups improve their understanding and acknowledge that digitalization is a crucial prerequisite to efficient decarbonization, through secure and seamless exchange of data that in return lead to optimized infrastructure operation and create value for customers and society. Europe is now positioned and strongly required to advance its data economy and the profound system transformation – yet today, the potential that is available to energy market and system actors remains largely untapped. In response, INSIEME pilots the Common European Energy Data Space (CEEDS), with the purpose of streamlining, securing and implementing the infrastructure elements that are required to build a Digital Single Energy Market across the European Union[1].

INSIEME, as a flagship initiative recently launched under the EU’s Digital Europe Programme, pursues the main objective to pave the way for the Common European Energy Data Space, in line with the European Action Plan for the Digitalisation of the Energy Sector, with over 50 European partners[2] from across the energy and data value chain conducting use-cases and deployments over the course of 36 months.

[1] as foreseen in the European Strategy for Data (2020)

[2] INSIEME project partners include leading European entities among energy data space operators and initiatives, EU and national sector associations, transmission as well as distribution system operators, hardware and IT providers, operators of local flexibility markets, energy community platforms, and energy management platforms, data infrastructures joint ventures, as well as research and academia.