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Renewable energy communities are the future of sustainable energy

Posted: 03-09-2024

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    Using renewable energy communities (REC’s), Sustainability Dingle provides an alternative, more efficient and greener method for powering the region by organising consumers into groups, so they can work together to balance their energy supply & demand.

    The Sustainability Dingle project ran from March 2022 to May 2024 and has successfully delivered a sustainability model which can maximise a regions balance of its energy load with locally integrated renewable energy technology within Energy Communities (EC’s). Led by Walton Institute from South East Technological University (SETU) with Údarás na Gaeltachta (UnG) as partners, the project was funded through the SEAI RD&D programme. Mol Teic t/a Dingle Creativity and Innovation Hub and Corca Dhuibhne Community Energy served as collaborators on the project.

    Ireland has significant potential to engage the energy citizen as central tenants of the Clean Energy Transition. New EU directives have been implemented which place the energy citizen at the centre of this transition. Ireland is in the process of transposing these directives into law and an opportunity exists to implement mechanisms which will have a lasting impact on our sustainability as a nation. Key to these developments is the creation of energy communities where renewable energy technologies can be implemented locally such that they can be sustainably balanced using mechanisms such as Peer to Peer (P2P) energy trading, demand side management, load shifting and battery storage.

    What did the project deliver?

    A key to REC’s is a software platform developed by this project which presents a geographic map with an accurate representation of the local network overlaid with the details of load profiles and the number and type of meters at each node.

    The REC concept comes from new EU Directives which enable local groups to generate, sell, store and share energy within their communities. Currently, local groups such as West Kerry are not engaged in the Clean Energy Transition and REC’s can provide the scale and legal framework to become actively involved.

    Opportunities for improvement of the grid

    The platform enables the end user to create EC’s at any point on the network and create specific sustainability reports. It encapsulates all the functionality developed for the project and facilitates various scenarios to be built by amending the criteria and assessing the effect on results. The project found that significant sustainability results can be achieved using EC concepts within the existing grid. Significant expansion of the grid will be required when heat and transport are electrified. However, the project proved that this expansion can be accommodated on the current grid using the balancing aspects of EC’s.

    What is the future / next step of this research?  

    EC’s are flourishing across the EU where regulatory authorities and DSO’s have been proactive in the transposition of the EU Directives. They facilitate the energy citizen to become involved in the energy markets and become prosumers. It gives the legal structure for industrial, commercial and residential end users to organise themselves in groups and the technology to enable them to integrate renewable energy and smart grid techniques to maximise their self-sustainability.

    Ireland must follow the lead of our EU counterparts to bring these advantages to the network and the energy citizen to enable them to partake in the markets.

    For a copy of the full project report or for further details please contact info@waltoninstitute.ie