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UBITECH Group kicks off the frESCO Innovation Action on new business models for innovative energy services for residential consumers

UBITECH and UBITECH ENERGY participates in the virtual kick-off meeting, hosted by CIRCE (June 10, 2020), of the frESCO Innovation Action, officially started on June 1st, 2020. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 893857) and spans on the period June 2020 – November 2023. The vision of the frESCO project to engage with ESCOs and aggregators and enable the deployment of innovative business models, on the basis of novel energy and integrated energy service bundles that properly combine and remunerate local flexibility for optimizing local energy performance both in the form of energy efficiency (energy savings) and demand side management (demand response). Such new service and business models will bring under common Pay for Performance Contracts (extended form of current EPCs) two currently differentiated service offerings to enable the realization of next-generation smart energy service packages.

The frESCO service packages will combine moderate retrofitting services (smart equipment for data collection and remote/ automated control) with energy efficiency, distributed energy resources (generation and storage) with self-consumption optimization schemes and smart home automation with the provision of balancing and ancillary services to the grid (under the form of demand response), to engage residential consumers in energy efficiency/ grid optimization activity through integrated and tailor-made packages addressing different customer groups, their unique needs and preferences, without overlooking important aspects of the modern citizens demand for comfort and well-being (human-centric energy optimization).

Within frESCO, UBITECH drives the architectural design and the specifications of the frESCO solution, as well as the development of the multi-service package toolkit for  ESCOs and aggregators that enables them to provide the bundled energy services to residential consumers with enough flexibility so as to adapt their offer to their customers’ requirements. In particular, UBITECH develops the Energy Management Analytics and Self-Consumption Optimization Tool for ESCOs, targeting on one hand the extraction of insights with regards to energy management aspects to ESCOs and on the other hand on the provision of optimal plans to ESCOs for planning their self-consumption characteristics, as well as the Advanced Flexibility Analytics and Optimal VPP configuration tool for Consumer-Centric Demand Response Optimization, concerning the optimisation of fitting as much as possible energy demand and response in smart grid settings. Moreover, UBITECH contributes towards the implementation of the Big Data Collection, Management, Automation, Privacy and Interoperability Workbench, incorporating a set of services including: Big Data Ingestion, Curation and Management Services, Personal and Enterprise Big Data and Edge Analytics Services, and Data Assets Security, Encryption and Privacy Services. Finally, UBITECH ENERGY works, within frESCO, towards the definition of novel business models and frESCO service bundles and their validation in a simulation environment.