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Back in 2019, electrical engineer Christina Papadimitriou had a vision: Individual buildings should become self-sufficient when it comes to energy, and should be an integral part of multimodal energy hubs that distribute energy in a fair and cost-effective way under an energy community concept. That vision culminated in the project eNeuron: Optimal Design and Operation of Multi-Carrier Energy Communities, which was one of the first European projects to implement the vision of an integrated grid at a high level of maturity.

Operating energy communities is complex. A typical neighborhood may include solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, heat pumps, and thermal storage systems. Traditional approaches usually treat these technologies separately and focus mainly on electricity. The eNeuron project introduced the concept of Integrated Local Energy Communities (ILECs), where neighborhoods are treated as coordinated energy ecosystems in which electricity, heating, cooling, and mobility are optimized together considering both technical and social factors.

Connecting brains
At the household level, each home is equipped with its own Energy Management System (EMS), capable of optimizing local assets and interacting with neighboring homes to exchange energy and flexibility. Under the common umbrella of the community, these distributed EMSs are further coordinated through the Energy Hub concept, which allows production, storage, and consumption technologies to interact within one unified framework and collectively interface with the wider electricity grid. This enables communities not only to balance renewable generation, flexible demand, and storage, but also to support common objectives such as, cost reduction and self-consumption, while contributing in congestion management and enhanced system resilience.

The project brought together 17 research and industry partners with a total budget of 6.28 million euros, with Papadimitriou serving as its technical coordinator. ‘I was responsible for ensuring the overall technical coherence and integration of the project activities across partners, work packages, and demonstration sites,’ she explains. ‘My role was to align these work packages and make sure that we were serving the ambitions and objectives of the project. In addition to this, I led the main technical work package, which focused on putting together the brain of the system: the Energy Management System.’

Looking ahead
The project resulted in the eNeuron toolbox, a digital platform for designing (from scratch or expanding) and operating complex multi-energy systems and comparing different strategies for energy communities. At the heart of the approach is a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework that continuously looks ahead using forecasts of renewable generation, electricity demand, and market prices, allowing the system to anticipate problems before they occur. In practice, this means batteries can be charged before peak-price periods, electric vehicles can be coordinated to avoid transformer overloads, and energy demand can be shifted to moments of high renewable production.

All of this is done without overruling the users’ needs or wishes. For example, by understanding how indoor temperature evolves over time, the system can pre-heat or pre-cool buildings when renewable energy is abundantly available, and reduce demand during critical hours, while fully preserving user comfort.

What makes the eNeuron approach unique, is that apart from the fact that the community members are free to choose how they collaborate, the toolbox preserves the privacy of the participants: the overarching community manager gets the least possible non-personal information about the individual participants. This way, the eNeuron project addressed a key societal dilemma in the energy transition: how to efficiently coordinate decentralized energy systems while safeguarding citizens’ privacy and maintaining public trust in digital infrastructures.

Versatile solution
The plug-and-play eNeuron toolbox has been validated in four pilots in four different countries, which came with their own challenges, Papadimitriou explains. ‘We had a campus in Italy, a municipality in Poland, a stadium with surrounding homes in Norway and a naval site in Portugal.’

In all of these cases, the eNeuron concept was successfully applied and achieved great results, she says with pride. ‘We achieved substantial improvements in local energy system performance, reaching up to 36% reduction in community energy costs, between 55% and 91% CO₂ emission reductions, 47% reduction in distribution network losses, up to 46% increase in local energy self-sufficiency, and a 19% increase in renewable self-consumption.’ What’s more, these improvements were achieved with 100% compliance with indoor comfort and air-quality constraints. By unlocking flexibility from distributed assets, up to 20% of renewable generation could be shifted in time, illustrating the potential of energy communities to alleviate grid congestion and reduce the need for costly grid reinforcements.

After the official EU project ended last January, the research seamlessly continues in the MOOI-BACH-project, led by Papadimitriou. ‘In that project, we are building a similar system to integrate data, electricity, gas, heat, and hydrogen supply and demand to increase the effective capacity of the energy grid and solve congestion in Brainport region. BACH extends this concept by linking Energy Hubs operation to congestion management and external market participation, enabling local flexibility to support both community-level and system-level needs.’

Christina Papadimitriou: Energy should never become a privilege for the few. By placing people at the center of innovation, we can protect it as a shared public good.

Importance of social aspect
The most important lesson Papadimitriou wants to share about her experiences with the eNeuron project is that in developing energy technology, the social aspect is extremely important. ‘Where this project started from a techno-economic point of view, we soon understood that the connection with the community at early stages is key. For example: in the case of the Portuguese military naval base, we were confronted with some critical loads and privacy concerns due to the nature of the site we had not foreseen. The eNeuron toolbox is cloud-based, and thus amendments should be done before it could run in Portugal. That is when we understood that we needed a privacy-preserving approach, and that before implementing the system, we need to realize what the criticalities are in a certain energy community. Of course the privacy-preserving part was welcomed by all communities of the project.’

Energy should not be turned into a luxury product, the Greek scientist states. ‘Energy should never become a privilege for the few. By placing people at the center of innovation, we can protect it as a shared public good.’