On Tuesday, September 10, BUILD UP hosted a webinar organised by the CREATORS project on ‘Empowering Energy Communities: Celebrating the Achievements of the CREATORS Project’. The webinar provided a hands-on perspective to understand the CREATORS project, whose main goal is to assist local initiators throughout the entire lifecycle of Community Energy Systems projects with a set of tools and services and bringing the CES-as-a-service model to market.

The webinar started with an introduction on the CREATORS project, given by Stijn Van Hoye, the Project Coordinator. ‘The objective of our project is to speed the integration of energy communities in Europe, to create a scalable and easily replicable model’ said Stijn. ‘Throughout these years, we were able to create a simulation emulation engine and to develop a contractual and financial framework and tools to validate the concepts’.

During the second session, Aleksandar Kavgic, Senior Business Developer for Typhoon HIL, gave an overview of the software tools developed. ‘The architecture of the software allows for a modelling approach, enabling de-risking and fastening communities energy system. The tool answers operational question on production and consumption in the modelling environment without the need for users to experiment’ explained Aleksandar.

In the third panel, Blanca Barrios, Project Manager at R2M Solution, delved into the applications and services for community energy systems (CES). ‘We wanted to include our own service offering: CES-as-a-service’ said Blanca. ‘Our idea is that we will guide the potential user thought the whole life cycle of a CES, supporting them in the design, configuration, investment as well as on the operation of the energy community’.

Finally, Stijn Van Hoye, the Project Coordinator, and Boris Sucic, Senior Expert at the Jozef Stefan Institute, presented some of the key achievements reached during the project in the Slovenian and Belgian cases. ‘Thanks to the Slovenian success case, we have learned that the main challenge in planning a sustainable-energy project is to guarantee the appropriate involvement of all the relevant stakeholders throughout the whole process’ Sucic concluded.