ADFLEX is developing a digital twin of homes in Ireland’s sustainable energy communities to simulate energy demand, generation and flexibility, helping communities plan for higher shares of renewable energy in support of Ireland’s 2030 renewable electricity target.
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ADFLEX is developing a digital twin of homes in Ireland's sustainable energy communities to simulate energy demand, generation, and flexibility, helping communities plan for higher shares of renewable energy under Ireland's 2030 renewable electricity target.
Ireland has set a target of 80% renewable electricity by 2030. Homes with rooftop solar can now export electricity, creating two-way power flows on local networks that were not originally designed for them. At the same time, assets such as electric vehicles, heat pumps, immersion heaters, and battery storage add significant, flexible demand that can be shifted to off-peak hours to ease pressure on the grid.
ADFLEX is led by Maynooth University's International Research on Energy System Integration, Education, and Environment for Sustainability and Innovation (IRESI) Centre, in collaboration with University College Dublin (UCD) and Arden Energy, and funded by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI). It explores how a digital twin can help residential communities navigate this transition.
For the Ringsend sustainable energy community in Dublin, ADFLEX researchers are developing and testing a digital twin of the community's buildings. It uses real-time data from solar panels, heat pumps, immersion heaters and battery storage to simulate how energy is generated, consumed, and shifted within each home. When aggregated across the community, this flexibility can be evaluated for its potential to ease pressure on the local distribution network. This approach gives other Irish energy communities a practical pathway to plan for higher shares of renewables and could inform similar efforts across Europe as more countries move towards smart, flexible buildings.
The challenge behind these targets is structural, not just technical. Local distribution networks in Ireland, as in most of Europe, were designed for one-way power flow: electricity moving from large, centralised generators through the network to homes. Rooftop solar inverts that logic in places, and networks were not built with that in mind.
Figure 1: From one-way generation to a two-way, distributed grid. Left: the conventional model, where power flows one way from centralised plants to consumers. Right: a more distributed model, where solar, wind and battery storage operate alongside conventional generation, and homes can act as both consumers and producers (prosumers) in a two-way exchange.
At the same time, the assets driving this change are precisely the ones that can help manage it. A heat pump, an immersion heater, or a home battery does not need to draw or discharge power at a fixed moment. Within reasonable limits, that demand can be shifted to when renewable generation is highest, or away from moments of local network stress. That shiftable capacity is what flexibility means in practice, and it is only useful if it can be measured, forecast, and coordinated. This is the gap ADFLEX addresses at the residential level.
At the centre of ADFLEX's approach is a digital twin: a live, data-driven model of the Ringsend community's homes, built from the real-time data streams of the assets each home contains. Rather than treating each home as an isolated data source, the twin aggregates these real-time inputs – rooftop solar generation, heat pump and immersion heater loads, and battery storage activity – into a single representation of the community's residential energy behaviour.
The digital twin's current scope is deliberately focused: it simulates demand, generation, and flexibility potential at the level of the homes themselves, rather than the wider distribution network. That focus matters. Before flexibility can be coordinated across a community or offered to a network operator, it first must be understood and quantified at the source, home by home, asset by asset. The digital twin developed through ADFLEX represents this foundational step.
The wider ADFLEX system is designed to build on this foundation. Home-level data is intended to pass through a middleware layer, referred to within the project as the Digital Spine. This layer is designed eventually to coordinate information between homes and the digital twin, as well as with market-facing actors such as aggregators and with the distribution system operator (DSO) and the wider grid. Direct data exchange with the network operator and grid-level coordination form part of the target architecture ADFLEX is working towards, rather than the current scope of the digital twin itself.
Figure 2: The ADFLEX system architecture. The digital twin currently models home-level asset data; broader DSO and market integration shown here reflects the target system design.
Ringsend, in Dublin, was selected as ADFLEX's residential pilot site because it reflects the mix of assets increasingly common across Irish homes: rooftop solar, heat pumps, and, in some cases, battery storage, operating together rather than in isolation. Testing the digital twin against real, occupied homes rather than synthetic data is central to the project's approach, since assumptions about how flexible demand behaves in practice often diverge from how it behaves on paper.
The insights generated at Ringsend are intended to be transferable. Rather than producing a one-off model specific to a single community, ADFLEX aims to establish a methodology for how to collect, model, and interpret home-level flexibility data that other sustainable energy communities across Ireland could apply to their own building stock and asset mix.
For Ringsend itself, a working digital twin gives the community, and the researchers studying it, a way to see aggregated demand and generation patterns that would otherwise remain invisible at the level of individual meters. For Irish energy communities more broadly, ADFLEX's approach offers a practical, evidence-based route to plan for higher shares of renewables without waiting for network-level solutions to arrive first.
The relevance extends beyond Ireland. As European countries pursue smarter and more flexible buildings as part of the EU’s energy and building performance objectives, understanding and coordinating residential flexibility before it can be offered to markets or network operators is an increasingly relevant challenge. A digital twin methodology developed and tested at residential level in one sustainable energy community could provide lessons for other European communities facing similar challenges.
ADFLEX's digital twin work begins where flexibility has to start: at the home, with the assets that generate, store, and shift energy day to day. By building a live, aggregated model of these assets across the Ringsend sustainable energy community, the project is establishing the foundational data and methodology needed before flexibility can be coordinated more widely, toward the local network, toward market participation, and toward Ireland's 2030 renewable electricity target. The approach is designed to be transferable, giving other Irish and European energy communities a practical starting point for their own path toward smarter, more flexible buildings.
