Integrid - Bridging the Gap

8 maintaining levels of comfort and efficiency in the industrial, services and residential sectors. For this to take place, new uses for available resources were foreseen, aided by digital tools ranging from forecast to vPP and flexibility aggregation platforms. As consumers become more conscience of their value, InteGrid refocused on user centric inte ractive solutions. Technological solutions were expected, but within the appropriate economic and regulatory frameworks, consolidating the experiences of several different European countries. Although different experiences reinforced the final proposition, they were not expected to be complementary. For this reason, extra consolidation effort with respect to regulation and derived economic aspects was put on stand-by. Leveraging the involvement of communities and citizen engagement in previous projects, InteGrid was required to look ahead for a new active role for populations to implement these new user centric solutions. Providing flexibility in different patterns was one way, however, using their feedback in a feasible manner was later proven be more beneficial when attempting to replicate their experience in other locations. Nevertheless, as communities have different needs, tailoring the response to different contexts needed resilience in all types of different and new situations: from industrial consumers to residential consumers, from supplier procedures to public entity protocols, and from academia to technology developers. Finally, with such a massive number of stakeholders involved, managing their energy data was expected to be a huge and unprecedented challenge. This in fact turned out to be the case! It should also be noted that this data was not meant to be used only by the DSO, but also provided back to the owners or to those to whom they passed on this responsibility. As such, data management also became a project concern, even before GDPR came into force. The challenges faced by the project could only be overcome by a team with multifaceted skills. Technology, Economics, Social and Regulatory fields all contributed to an exciting path. Expected outputs were turned into InteGrid solutions recognized by several stakeholders, as will be described in the following pages. Engaging stakeholders formed part of the InteGrid plan and while achieving engagement is something that any marketing player is capable of, establishing motivation and long-term enthusiasm requires something more. The success achieved in the engagement of participants in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Stockholm Royal Seaport, Norra Djurgårdsstaden, Sweden or Caldas da Rainha, Valverde and Samouco in Portugal can be seen in the more than 500 happy faces when these participants bring InteGrid to mind. InteGrid Outputs Intelligent tools for real-time monitoring and management to foster consumer participation in grid management Market Hub Platform activate participation in grid management and markets Advanced VPPs: nteroperable VPP that can work in different environments with different requirements Improved customer energy management systems by combining ICT with behavioural analysis Regulatory recomendations, suitable for target countries to contribute to ongoing debates at EU level (role of DSOs, grid code development, self- consumptions policies) Business models for new energy services Predictive grid management for distribution networks (MV and LV integration)