The success of the energy transition in Europe depends on the engagement of citizens and the sustainable replacement of conventional generation with renewable production. Highlights of the PAN European Technology Energy Research Approach (PANTERA) project, a H2020 coordination and support action, are presented in this paper. In broad terms, PANTERA offers a forum for actors in the smart grid to support the expansion of activities in smart grid research, demonstration, and innovation, especially in the below-average spending member states in the European Union (EU). The focus of this paper is on those activities of the project consortium related to the identification of gaps and barriers in regulations, standards, and network codes that hinder the sustainable engagement of energy citizens in the energy transition. The paper summarises the challenges to citizen engagement in the energy transit and considers the enablers that make the engagement of citizens viable, e.g., demand response (DR), renewable energy resources (RESs), and modern designs for local energy markets (LEMs). We focus on the barriers to the enablers that are explicitly and implicitly related to regulations, standards, and network codes and explore aspects of the relevant regulations and standards of the sample below-average spending member states. A specific case study of a research and demonstration project in Ireland for updating the network codes is also presented to demonstrate the ways in which member states are attempting to remove the barriers and enable citizen participation in the smart energy transition. Finally, the opportunities to foster smart grid research and innovation through shared knowledge and insights offered by the PANTERA European Interconnection for Research Innovation and Entrepreneurship (EIRIE) platform are highlighted.

The European Union’s vision for energy transition not only foresees decarbonization of the electricity sector, but also requires commitment across different sectors such as gas, heating, and cooling through an integrated approach. It also sets local energy communities at the center of the energy transition as a bottom-up approach to achieve these ambitious decarbonization goals. The energy hub is seen as a promising conceptual model to foster the optimization of multi-carrier energy systems and cross-sectoral interaction. Especially in the context of local energy communities, the energy hub concept can enable the optimal design, management, and control of future integrated and digitalized networks where multiple energy carriers operate seamlessly and in complementarity with each other. In that sense, the optimal design and operation of energy hubs are of critical importance, especially under the effect of multiple objectives taking on board not only technical, but also other aspects that would enable the sustainability of local energy communities, such as economic and environmental. This paper aims to provide an in-depth review of the literature surrounding the existing state-of-the-art approaches that are related to the design and operation optimization of energy hubs by also exploring their interaction with the external network and multiple markets. As the planning and operation of an energy hub is a multifaceted research topic, this paper covers issues such as the different optimization methods, optimization problems formulation including objective functions and constraints, and the hubs’ optimal market participation, including flexibility mechanisms. By systematizing the existing literature, this paper highlights any limitations of the approaches so far and identifies the need for further research and enhancement of the existing approaches.

Data-driven services offer a major shift away from traditional monitoring and control approaches that have been applied exclusively over the transmission and distribution networks. These services assist the electricity value chain stakeholders to enhance their data reach and improve their internal intelligence on electricity-related optimization functions. However, the penetration of data-driven services within the energy sector poses challenges across the regulatory, socioeconomic, and organizational (RSEO) domains that are specific to such business models. The present review examines the existence and importance of various obstacles across these domains regarding innovative energy services, new business models, data exchanges, and other actors’ synergies across the electricity data value chain. This research is centered around the European landscape, with a particular focus on the five demonstration countries (Greece, Spain, Austria, Finland, and Croatia) of the SYNERGY consortium. A state-of-the-art analysis on the regulatory, socioeconomic, and organizational aspects related to innovative energy services (IESs) revealed a plethora of such potential obstacles that could affect, in various degrees, the realization of such services, both at a prototyping and a market replication level. More specifically, 13 barriers were identified in the regulatory domain, 19 barriers were identified in the socioeconomic domain, and 16 barriers were identified in the organizational domain. Then, a comprehensive, survey-based data gathering exercise was designed, formulated, and conducted at a national level as well as at a stakeholder type level. To ensure that our analysis encompassed business-wide perspectives and was validated from the whole electricity data value chain, we utilized a trilevel analysis (i.e., partner, stakeholder type, demo country) to formulate qualitative interviews with business experts from each stakeholder type (namely TSOs, DSOs, aggregators/ESCOs, facility managers/urban planners, and RES Operators). By combining the quantitative data with the qualitative interviews, further recommendations on identifying and facilitating ways to overcome the identified barriers are provided. For the regulatory domain, it is recommended to treat nationally missing regulations by conforming to the provisions of the relevant EU directives, as well as to provide a flexibility-related regulation. For the socioeconomic domain, recommendations were made to increase consumer awareness and thus alleviate the three more impactful barriers identified in this domain. All organizational barriers can be alleviated by taking complex big-data-related issues away from the hands of the organizations and offering them data-as-a-service mechanisms that safeguard data confidentiality and increase data quality.

The combination of different energy vectors like electrical energy, hydrogen, methane, and water is a crucial aspect to deal with in integrated local energy communities (ILECs). The ILEC stands for a set of active energy users that maximise benefits and minimise costs using optimisation procedures in producing and sharing energy. In particular, the proper management of different energy vectors is fundamental for achieving the best operating conditions of ILECs in terms of both energy and economic perspectives. To this end, different solutions have been developed, including advanced control and monitoring systems, distributed energy resources, and storage. Energy management planning software plays a pivotal role in developing ILECs in terms of performance evaluation and optimisation within a multi-carrier concept. In this paper, the state-of-the-art of ILECs is further enhanced by providing important details on the critical aspects related to the overall value chain for constituting an ILEC (e.g., conceptualisation, connecting technologies, barriers/limitations, control, and monitoring systems, and modelling tools for planning phases). By providing a clear understanding of the technical solutions and energy planning software, this paper can support the energy system transition towards cleaner systems by identifying the most suitable solutions and fostering the advancement of ILECs.

Along with the increasing share of non-synchronous power sources, the inertia of power systems is being reduced, which can give rise to frequency containment problems should an outage of a generator or a power infeed happen. Low system inertia is eventually unavoidable, thus power system operators need to be prepared for this condition. This paper addresses the problem of low inertia in the power system from two different perspectives. At a system level, it proposes an operation planning methodology, which utilises a combination of power flow and dynamic simulation for calculation of existing inertia and, if need be, synthetic inertia (SI) to fulfil the security criterion of adequate rate of change of frequency (RoCoF). On a device level, it introduces a new concept for active power controller, which can be applied virtually to any power source with sufficient response time to create synthetic inertia. The methodology is demonstrated for a 24 h planning period, for which it proves to be effective. The performance of SI controller activated in a battery energy storage system (BESS) is positively validated using a real-time digital simulator (RTDS). Both proposals can effectively contribute to facilitating the operation of low inertia power systems.

The high penetration of the Renewable Energy Sources and other emerging technologies likely to be installed in future power grids will pose new operational challenges to grid operators. One of the main issues expected to affect the operation of the power grid is the impact of inverter-based technologies to the power system inertia and, hence, to system stability. Consequently, the main challenge of the future grid is the evaluation of the frequency stability in the presence of inverter-based systems and how the aforementioned technology can support frequency stability without the help of the rotating masses of the traditional power grid systems. To assess the above problem, this paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the frequency stability in a projection of the real distribution grid in Cyprus with the time horizon to be the year 2030. The power grid under investigation is evaluated with and without the presence of smart hierarchical controllers for providing support to the power system under disturbance conditions. The advanced controllers were applied to manage the available power resource in a fast and effective manner to maintain frequency within nominal levels. The controllers have been implemented in two hierarchical levels revealing useful responses for managing low-inertia networks. The first is set to act locally within a preselected area and the second level effectively supporting the different areas for optimal operation. After undertaking a significant number of simulations for time-series of one year, it was concluded from the results that the local control approach manages to minimize the frequency excursion effectively and influence all related attributes including the rate of change of frequency (RoCoF), frequency nadir and frequency zenith.