About EnergyXchange

1. Scientific and technological objectives of the proposed project
2. The EnergyXchange project will produce
3. Partners

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, the non-yet exploitation of the recently discovered energy sources, its small market size and the remote and isolated nature of its geographical position in relation to the continental Europe, being on EU’s curbs, renders the actual liberalisation of the electricity market a not straight forward and ambitious goal. The Cyprus energy market is still in its infantry levels compared to the envisaged EU framework liberalization and competition levels.

Although recently a sum of 120 MWp photovoltaic plants have been licensed from Cyprus Energy Regulatory Authority (CERA) and the plants are currently under construction, 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 competition in the production and supply sides. More specifically, CERA issued two regulatory decisions in January 2017 to be harmonized with the EU framework and the EU Target Model.

The decisions stress the scepticism of CERA associated with the delays incurred towards the transition to the new electricity market model and the development of the infrastructure that will facilitate this transition.

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, in the context of the aforementioned decisions, there is a long way until the new electricity market is ready to be launched. This research proposal covers two major gabs:

Provides the means for applying the issued regulations that regulate the relationship between the generation side and the supplier side. 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.

Academic research has advanced significantly with intelligent ICT solutions which could bridge these gaps, facilitating and expediting the introduction of new energy market model. However, these academic results are in general disconnected from the industry. In the EnegyXchange project, we aim to bridge the aforementioned gaps by bridging these two worlds, the academia and the industry.
 

Scientific and technological objectives of the proposed project

The EnergyXchange project is comprised of the following scientific and technological objectives:

• Objective 1: Design, integrate and evaluate the EnergyXchange Platform in a real-operational environment

For this objective, the consortium will design the EnergyXchange Platform, a specialized software to support energy exchange and energy ancillary services. In specific, the Platform will be composed of smart software and hardware, which facilitate the secure communication between smart meters, PV plants energy management system, SCADA and telemetry databases as well as the web services. It will be a scalable trading and big-data mining platform with different functionality for each stakeholder of the new energy market. The EnergyXchange Platform will provide a User Interface for the producer, the aggregator, the supplier, the prosumer and the system operator to facilitate bilateral agreements between different ontologies/stakeholders, the 24hours-ahead market trading, the spot-market trading and the optimal prosumer profile matching with the energy plans offered by the suppliers. The goal is to install the first version of the EnergyXcahnge Platform by Month 13, and monitor its pilot usage for at least 6 months.

 

• Objective 2: Mitigate the risk of the suppliers, facilitating their seamless introduction to the new energy market and their sustainable operation

For this objective, the consortium will perform risk analysis and assessment with regards to the operation and decision making of the suppliers. This will be a valuable tool for the suppliers since it will enable them to make bilateral agreements with energy producers and aggregators according to the actual net demand of their customers. Maintaining this energy balance in a financially sound manner is vital for the sustainability and the profitability of the suppliers. On the other hand, the proposed tool facilitates the introduction of new players to the supply side, stimulating the competition as this is reflected in the EU framework.

 

• Objective 3: Provide scalability by enabling the introduction of new players to the new energy market

The development of the EnergyXchange platform will be scalable allowing the introduction of new services in the new liberalized energy market such as reserves and ancillary services as well as capacity markets. The accomplishment of this objective renders the EnergyXchange a useful tool for the system operator and the reliability of the power system while opens up the market for new opportunities and investments.

 

• Objective 4: Validate that the EnergyXchange Platform can reduce the cost of electricity for the customers by 5-10%

For this objective, the consortium will evaluate the effectiveness of the EnergyXchange Platform in reducing the cost for the end user-customer in a simulated operating environment employing though, real system data, e.g., actual electricity prices and real supplier energy plans and tariffs. This will be achieved by collecting the consumption/load profile of the customers that ELETOYIA manages their PV plants and matching it with the most beneficial energy tariffs of one of the suppliers, employing pattern recognition and machine learning techniques. At least 4 months of data will be considered for evaluating the efficiency improvement.

 

• Objective 5: Produce a Commercialization Plan

This objective is after the end of the project and is related to the aim of exploring investor's funding to further explore the development and commercialization of the EnergyXchange Platform.

The EnergyXchange project will produce:
 

1. The EnergyXchange Platform, which is comprised of the back-end server with distributed databases, big-data analytics infrastructure, Geographical Information System server for processing, a task scheduler for handling the orchestration of the different services and a web server.
2. The Supplier tool, which is the main weapon of the suppliers in the high risk energy battlefield.
3. The Ancillary services tool, which provides a scalability dimension to the Platform, opens new avenues for the new players and constitutes a valuable mean for the system operator and the system reliability.
4. The Profile matching tool for the consumers, providing them the best available tariff from a pool of different tariffs provided by different suppliers.

 

Partnerships

 

Poster of Project

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