Towards Interoperable Local Energy Communities in Austria

To ensure continued reliable operation of the energy grid in the face of a rising number of local energy communities (LECs), they need to be integrated in a way that ensures that they do not negatively impact but rather support the overall system, e.g., by providing flexibility. Project ECOSINT aims at intelligent, digital integration of LECs to achieve this goal. Along with several other tasks, this includes the development of a suitable software architecture, which is currently in progress and has yielded a conceptual model as a first result. Among the numerous requirements regarding LECs and their software architecture which have been collected in the initial phase of the project, interoperability has been identified as a crucial factor for success. This is addressed by incorporating AIT’s virtual lab (VLab) framework, which is presented and demonstrated using the example of an electric vehicle (EV) charging scenario as part of the ECOSINT solution.