Cyprus Potential on Renewable Energy as EU Member
Although Cyprus has adopted all the relevant prerequisites and adapted its national legislation and policy with regards to energy regulation and energy markets as a full member state of EU, Cyprus energy market is still in its infantry levels compared to the envisaged EU framework liberalization and competition levels. Recently a sum of 120 MWp photovoltaic plants have been licensed from Cyprus Energy Regulatory Authority (CERA) and the plants are currently under construction; however, there is an obvious obstacle towards integrating this energy into the new market model: there is not a mechanism to facilitate this process and match the demand side with the supply side from the logistic point of view nor the technological platform where the generated energy will be traded among the stakeholders.
Moreover, the entire electric power supply of the island is currently exclusively supplied by the state-owned Electricity Authority of Cyprus (EAC). Efforts have been made towards expediting the model shift from a monopolised to a liberalized electricity market in order to trigger the completion in the production and supply sides.
Although three other suppliers apart from EAC have been licenced, the market is not ready to integrate the new ontologies. Apart from the actions that CERA has instructed the Transmission System Operator (TSO) to proceed with there is a long way until the new electricity market is ready to be launched. This research project fills two major gabs of the Cyprus electricity market:
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Provides the means for applying the issued regulations that regulate the relationship between the generation side and the supplier side.
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Provides the framework under which the prosumers will choose their supplier, by matching the net consumption/injection profile with the most profitable energy plan/tariff of the supplier.
The EnegyXchange project, aims to bridge the aforementioned gabs, by bridging these two worlds, the academia and the industry and exploiting the recent advances in intelligent ICT solutions.
The general objective of the proposed innovation project is to conduct industrial research to develop and evaluate a novel product, EnergyXchange, which integrates state-of-the-art intelligent monitoring methods and big-data analytics, produced in academic research, to facilitate the introduction of energy stakeholders to the new liberalized energy market, enabling them to make energy contracts tailored to their generation/supply/demand profile and maximize their profit.
The partnership of the EnergyXchange project consist of: ELETOYIA (the coordinator), EUROCY, and KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence, University of Cyprus.
The EnergyXchange project is co-funded by Research and Innovation Foundation (formerly known as the Research Promotion Foundation), the European Union, and the Republic of Cyprus.