About the GENTE project

Accelerating the adoption of new Local Energy Communities across Europe through the creation of an advanced governance toolkit. The project started on 1 June 2022 and runs until 28 February 2025.

illustration of local energy communities showing buildings, trees, people waving at each other, a charging electric car, a person riding a bicycle, and a heatpump

Missions

GENTE's overarching mission is to:

Create a distributed governance toolkit for local energy communities (LECs) that will advance the green energy transition, support community sustainability and coherence.

GENTE's solutions will:

Exploit advanced digital technology for autonomous energy resource integration within and across LECs.

The project will:
Support new value chains through community participation and community federation
Shape new business models and investment models for communities
Support new employment opportunities
Enable sustainable financial growth

Outcomes

GENTE aims to create actionable, tangible and applicable outcomes for communities and energy managers with the goal to make the creation and operation of LECs as simple and achieveable as possible. The outcomes will take the following forms while insuring reproducibility, replicability and interoperability:

Methodologies & knowledge

Creating energy communities and community federations

Guidelines for tool adoption

Decision support tools for setting up

UX/UI guidelines

Guidelines and incentive schemes for community managers

Technologies

Data analytics (forecasting, local optimisation)

Management software for community federation manager

IoT Building Energy Management System (BEMS) including heat pumps

DLT-based community manager platform

Optimisation software for aggregators leveraging energy communities

Data collection tools, submetering IoT platform

DLT-based prosumer account platform

Mobile application

Services

Federation and aggregation deployment

Business models for communities, federation managers and aggregators

Edge device information to IoT platform

Design, sizing and modelling tools

Integration of community in trading platforms

Areas of innovation

GENTE will contribute to the green energy transition and energy decarbonisation by innovating in both the social and technological fields. Key areas include:

Need-owner engagement

Engagement tools and processes

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for communities

AI/ML-based forecasting

Multi-vector edge intelligence

Community Internet of Things (IoT)

Federated learning for privacy

Mobile integration

LEC federation

Platforms for LEC management and access

Need-owners

GENTE aims to involve a wide range of need-owners to make a big impact at both national scale as well as at the Europe-wide level. The main need-owners representing the potential users of the GENTE solutions are:

Prosumers and promoters of energy democracy projects

Energy Communities and Energy Managers providing services to the communities

Technology providers (e.g., heat-pump developer, ICT providers)

Energy/flexibility aggregators, energy retailers

System operators (DSO, TSO)

Building and Distributed Energy Resource (DER) owners

Environmental & socio-economic impacts

GENTE will bring the following beyond-tech benefits:
Reduction of CO2 emissions through the deployment of green LECs derived by fossil-fuel based power generation reduction.
Applicable business strategies for increased social acceptance and active engagement of LECs, resulting in faster adoption of GENTE solutions in different societal levels.
Reduction in DSO challenges through flexible control of DERs, ensuring higher hosting capacity of renewables and efficient grid utilisation.
Sustainable business models focused on the environment and social economy for overall reduction of investment cost by leveraging smart resources with possible support services from stakeholders.
Development of solutions enabling LECs to serve as building blocks for future energy systems and improve the overall economies of DERs even further.

Support the development of sustainable buildings & cities.

Conceptual architecture

GENTE includes innovative content at the prosumer, consumer manager, and federation manager levels.

Timeline

June 1. 2022
Project start
June 1. 2022
December 2023
Identification of relevant need owners completed
December 2023
March 2024
Device hardware and software functional prototype available for field testing
March 2024
July 2024
GENTE solutions deployed in all living labs
July 2024
September 2024
Toolkit for distributed governance of energy community completed
September 2024
November 2024
GENTE living labs validation and assessment completed
November 2024
28. February 2025
Project completion
28. February 2025

Our numbers

Communities
0
Countries
0
Partners
0
Funding
0 M

Our communities

GENTE’s communities are the project’s heart and soul. Their role is to enable the demonstration of solutions for new types of technologies and services in different technical, environmental and market contexts. They are the innovative people who enable GENTE’s ideas to become reality!

Troya Cooperative
Türkiye

HSB Living Lab
Sweden

CELL Living Lab
Switzerland

Discover our communities

Our partners

GENTE brings together an international consortium of highly qualified partners comprising need owners, citizens, scientific partners, technology providers, living labs, and demo sites.

Troya Renewable Energy Cooperative
Reengen
The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK)

Discover our partners

Sweden

Spain

Switzerland

Türkiye