Professor Birgitte Bak-Jensen explains how two EU Horizon projects allow local energy communities to experience the energy transition and increase energy autonomy by relying on local energy resources to achieve energy sustainability and justice through smart flexibility solutions.
Local energy communities have emerged as the basis for European decarbonization strategies. Mild nutrition shows that energy resilience, affordability and sustainability are closely linked to people, policies and technology when combined.
Building a sustainable community
From vision to action: A resilient local energy community
Four years ago, two EU Horizon 2020 projects, the gentle nutrition project, launched its mission to empower citizens, unlock the flexibility of local grids and accelerate green transitions through smart, integrated local energy systems. Today, these projects have provided a robust demonstration of how technology, community engagement, and policy innovation can contribute to community decarbonisation.
From the Dutch district of Orst to the Danish village of Scanderborg and the city of Poland in Priwitz, the results show that local energy systems can be clever, citizen-led and autonomous. These systems integrate renewable generation, electric mobility, heat pumps, energy storage and intelligent control to balance supply and demand in real time.
Energy Islands: Resilience starts locally
The local energy community acts as an “energy island,” interconnected but locally optimized, balancing its own energy consumption with renewable power generation and smart flexibility. Whether supplying electric buses in Poland, community heat pumps in Denmark, or sharing surplus PV generation in the Netherlands, communities are proving that resilient energy futures start at the local level.
Unlocked flexibility at the community level makes it easier for larger systems to operate. Local energy islands can act as a grid partner and provide auxiliary services such as peak shaving, voltage regulation and demand response.
Unlocking flexibility: From consumers to professional sumer to flexors
The core of the project focuses on transforming citizens into active energy participants. Through demonstration activities, residents are both energy-consuming and generating, becoming proschmers, frecumers, and offering the flexibility to support local grids through smart devices, EVs and storage. Flexumers surpasses traditional professional sumers by actively contributing to grid stability. By moving demand away from peak times or abandoning electricity stored during shortages, these active citizens represent the future of decentralized energy systems.
Technology solutions for flexibility
CEMS: The core of the community energy system
Developed in Denmark, the Community Energy Management System (CEMS) serves as the intelligent core for the energy community. Track local production, consumption, and electricity prices, adjust devices such as EV chargers, heat pumps, and batteries to optimize energy flow and reduce costs.
Similar EMS solutions are used in public buildings in Poland to regulate flexible loads such as rooftop PVs, storage systems, and heat pumps and EV charging. In India, EMSS fits rural microgrids and smart buildings, managing energy access and reliability in areas with weak or no grid connections.
Thermonet and thermal flexibility
In Danish villages, the thermonet system supplies cold heating through a shared ground loop and community heat pump. Integrated control ensures efficient operation based on PV availability, weather forecasting and user needs.
Rural Indian pilots use Multi-city Heat Pumps (MUHPs) that provide heating, cooling and drying for agricultural use, making heat flexibility an important enabler of sustainable livelihoods.
EV charging with grid support
Electric mobility presents new challenges to the local grid, especially with uncontrolled charging. Aalborg University in Denmark has developed an EV charging system that can adapt to both voltage and pricing, including departure times and grid signals. Users interact through the app to enable cost-saving or low-emission charging. Initial testing shows that smart algorithms help maximize renewable use and avoid costly grid reinforcement.
At Twente University’s Sri Park Lab, nine smart charging stations line up EVs that charge locally generated electricity from rooftop PV panels and battery storage, thereby increasing local self-sufficiency. Poland implements similar smart charging of local government fleets and buildings. In India, EV charging is integrated into solar and hybrid PV-Wind DC microgrids in rural off-grid and weak grid regions.
Storage of thermal and battery
To alleviate grid strain and improve renewable energy use, the project implemented thermal and battery storage technologies. In Denmark, heat tanks using phase change materials (PCM) enhance heat retention by accumulating latent heat, making them suitable for low temperature systems such as thermonets.
In Poland, public buildings, a complex of schools and sports centres, combine rooftop PVs with large battery systems to reduce peak loads, support off-grid operations, and provide real-time data for EMS optimization.
The Indian pilot goes further, integrating biogas electric hybrids into both electricity and clean cooking. A solar and wind power battery bank of up to 290 KWH in remote villages will replace diesel generators, allowing flexible energy use in agriculture, education and healthcare.
Social innovation and community empowerment
Advanced technology makes energy systems smarter, but it’s the people who really make it sustainable. Beyond gentleness and nutrition, social innovation has proven to be just as important as technological development. These projects emphasize that by promoting dialogue, trust and joint ownership, passive energy consumers can be transformed into engaged and empowered community actors. Social empowerment is more than just an add-on. It is the engine that drives the local energy transition.
Engagement starts with a conversation
In Scanderborg, Denmark, the road to local heating solutions began with an open dialogue. The municipality invited residents of the district’s unheated villages to a public meeting to provide technical options, planning tools, and support to explore collective heating alternatives such as thermonets and shared heat pumps. These meetings did not only inform us. They became active. Residents formed energy groups, coordinated through social media, and applied for funding together, creating a strong foundation for long-term community-driven energy action.
The power of existing communities
In the OLST, the Aardehuizen Eco-Village showed the strength of established social networks. Due to their strong commitment to sustainability and self-sufficiency, residents were enthusiastic collaborators in developing and testing energy solutions. They co-designed the Energy Management Dashboard, allowed researchers to test boiler control systems in their homes, and organized working groups to manage their infrastructure. Their resilience, openness and technical curiosity have significantly accelerated innovation and provided valuable insight into the project team and future replicates.
Co-creation and trust
Building trust was essential, especially when installing experimental devices and collecting usage data. Local coordinators acted as a bridge between residents and researchers, and the co-design workshops helped ensure that the solutions were tailored to the user’s actual needs. Trust led to deeper cooperation in both the Dutch and Polish protesters. Some residents helped install devices, troubleshoot the system, and even co-author aspects of the solution. When the community feels ownership, participation moves from passive to aggressive.
Mapping and Matched Social Preparation Levels (SRL)
Not all communities are ready to cooperate with the new energy system. Therefore, the project team assessed the social readiness level (SRL) of each site and adapted their engagement strategies accordingly. The High-SRL community focuses on customizing and optimizing flexibility for smart control systems. In contrast, communities with lower SRLs received more basic support, awareness campaigns and a simplified interface to help build local energy groups. This flexible approach allowed all communities to travel along their energy journeys, regardless of where they started.
Impacts, lessons learned, future replication
Nutrition and gentle projects have provided important insights into how social and technological innovation can foster resilient and sustainable local energy communities. Flexible technologies have been integrated with deployment, testing and CEMS across demonstration sites in Europe and India. The results show that customized implementation and citizen engagement are essential to success.
Lessons from field demonstrations show that flexible energy control can optimize custody, reduce peak demand, and improve grid reliability. The Danish and Dutch projects have demonstrated how homes become active players in their energy systems when equipped with smart devices and user-friendly interfaces. The Indian site showed that energy access, when owned and adapted locally, can bring great social benefits, from lighting and clean cooking to cold storage of farming.
In Poland, gas-based systems for domestic hot water preparation have been replaced with heat pumps linked to district heating networks, significantly improving safety, comfort and decarbonization. Meanwhile, the challenges of digital integration between sites emphasize the need for standardization and interoperability, especially when legacy infrastructure exists.
The demo activity also revealed that while many communities are motivated by environmental concerns, it also enables tools such as dynamic tariffs, visual dashboards and co-designed EMS interfaces to further increase user participation. Energy flexibility was achieved without compromising comfort, and community-level participation was enhanced by transparent communication and shared interests.
The project introduced a tiered roadmap for energy vehicles, ranging from the independence of grid-off-grids in rural India to shared battery storage and joint PVs in urban Europe. Most European sites move from traditional Grid Reliance (Tier 5) to interconnected, partially autonomous systems (Tier 6) with full-automatic cars (Tier 7) ambitions.
Replication possibilities are promising. Despite regional differences, key enablers include citizen trust, appropriate governance structures, legal flexibility, and financial mechanisms of shared infrastructure. Technologies such as multi-utility heat pumps, EV smart charging, and modular EMS systems can be adapted to the entire region. Lessons from one site can inspire practical strategies for other sites.
The project recommends removing regulatory barriers, enabling local energy trading and encouraging flexibility services. With a clear legal framework and citizen-centric design, local energy systems could become a pillar of the clean energy transition.
Disclaimer
These projects are funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under the grant agreement No. 957682 for the Serene Form Project, under the Nutrition Project No. 101022587, and under the Nutrition Projects of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) (DST) Nutrition Project. The results of these projects reflect only the views of these consortiums, and the funding agency and the European Commission are not responsible for the use of the information contained.
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