Trondheim, Limerick, Alba Iulia, Pisek, Sestao, Smolyan and Voru and their industry and research partners are joining forces to co-create the future we want to live in. As aspiring Lighthouse and Follower Cities, respectively, they have detailed out their ambitions into the +CityxChange proposal, which describes a structured approach on how to develop and deploy Positive Energy Blocks and Districts and scale these out as part of the Clean Energy Transition. The approach combines: Prototyping the Future through Integrated Planning and Design; Enabling the Future through Creation of a Common Energy Market; and Accelerating the Future through CommunityxChange with all stakeholders of the city. New forms of integrated spatial, social, political, economic, regulatory, legal, and technological innovations will deliver citizen observatories, innovation playgrounds, regulatory sandboxes, and Bold City Visions to engage civil society, local authorities, industry, and RTOs to scale up from PEBs to PEBs to Positive Energy Cities, supported by a distributed and modular energy system architecture that goes beyond nZEB. On top of this, the consortium will create a new energy market design coupled to consumer-driven innovation, developed in close working cooperation with national regulators, DSOs/CSOs, property developers, and local energy communities. Flexibility will be put at the core of the distributed energy system by creating new micro-grid operation, prosumer-driven Community System Operators, and new markets for peak shaving/RES trading to reduce grid investment needs and curtailment. Their aim is to realize Europe-wide deployment of Positive Energy Districts by 2050 and prepare the way for fully Positive Energy Cities.

The energy systems of 2025 will be based on increasing levels of RES penetration and DSO’s will need new insight into how their networks are performing to optimise their operations financially. At the same time, the 5G mobile networks will be deployed by 2025 offering low latency, high availability services enabling data driven control. The evolution of the energy sector is increasingly focused on energy as a service. What DSOs now need is to accelerate their ability to introduce innovations, such as those based on the sharing economy, by themselves using services increasing their flexibility to adapt and reducing their need for fixed investments. SOGNO will address this challenge by combining the application of deep intelligence techniques, industry grade data analysis and visualisation tools, advanced sensors, an advanced power measurement unit and 5G based ICT to provide fine grained visibility and control of both MV and LV power networks using end to end automation in a virtualised environment. Our results are provided as turnkey services, validated in DSO field trials (to TRL level 6) preparing them for market introduction beginning shortly after the project ends. An Open API will be provided to enable third parties to market their services in our eco-system creating further market growth. Regulatory and standards changes needed to enable the deployment of advanced techniques will be prepared by the project. Ethical business models will support the market introduction of turnkey services. Commercialisation of the project results, as energy services, will result in disruptive change in the DSO energy market enabling breakthroughs in the speed and cost effectiveness of DSO large scale roll out of automation and growth in the energy services market in Europe and beyond. The SOGNO vision will unlock a new service-oriented market making Europe’s energy sector the most advanced and open in the world.

Living in a safe and secure society is a fundamental human need. The security of critical infrastructures must be maintained so that supplies of power, water or other resources are secured. Modern critical infrastructures are increasingly complex and they are turning into Cyber-Physical Infrastructures because ICT is growing in importance in infrastructure management. The SUCCESS project will develop an overarching approach to threat and countermeasure analysis with special focus on the vulnerabilities introduced by Smart Meters. The main challenge is to create the conditions in Europe for the future energy system to be as reliable as todays. Starting from a security by design approach and placing resiliency and survivability in focus, a new joint design of Energy Infrastructure and ICT is proposed. Following on the research results, an implementation approach is pursued based on the definition of a New-generation Open Real-time smart Meter (NORM) as a key building block. NORM aims to secure the end nodes of the energy system while providing innovative services in a customer centric grid. At systems level, a cloud-approach, based on double virtualization, is proposed. SUCCESS will provide concrete guidelines to support the design of energy systems and linked communications networks to guide short, medium and long term initiatives. Countermeasures will include specifications and open source software for Next Generation Open Real time smart Meters and Security Monitoring Centres at DSO and Pan-European levels, secure communications solutions using NFV, LTE and 5G technologies complemented by data privacy studies to ensure the acceptability of the results by consumers. Trials will be run in Ireland, Italy and Romania. As a result, new business opportunities for energy providers, SME’s and start-ups will generate economic growth in the energy and ICT sectors. SUCCESS combines the dedicated work of leading research and commercial organisations in these sectors.

Future energy systems will use renewable energy sources to minimise CO2 emissions. Currently large generators powered by fossil fuel turbines maintain the stability and quality of energy supplies through their inertia. The inertia of these generator-turbine groups gives providers a significant time window in which to react to network events. We urgently need to find ways to stabilise energy systems with up to 100% RES (where inertia is often lost due to power converter mediated energy transfer) to generate “RE-SERVEs” so that society can relax in the knowledge that it has a stable and sustainable energy supply. RE-SERVE will address this challenge by researching new energy system concepts, implemented as new system support services enabling distributed, multi-level control of the energy system using pan-European unified network connection codes. Near real-time control of the distributed energy network will be enabled by innovative 5G based ICT. Energy system use case scenarios supplied by energy providers will form the basis of energy system models. Performance characteristics of the new control mechanisms will be investigated through integration of energy simulations and live 5G communications. We will create a pan-European multi-site simulation test-bed, bringing together the best facilities in Europe. RE-SERVE results include published models of system support services, innovative architectures for the implementation of the services, performance tests on our pan-European real-time simulation, and live, test-beds, a model for pan-European unified network connection codes and actions to promote results to standardisation organisations, all of which maintain the RE-SERVE in energy systems. Commercialisation of results will result in breakthroughs in the efficient utilisation of use of RES, a spin-off and a wide range of enhanced professional solutions and services.