The ambition of the STREAM project (STREAM) is the creation of an innovative and robust flexibility ecosystem (“STREAM Ecosystem”) on the low voltage (LV) grid side of existing power markets connecting data, technologies, stakeholders and markets, thus facilitating the flexibility provision. A variety of benefits for both technical- and non-technical aspects of energy services supporting power market and power grid operations will be created. STREAM will empower data from flexible devices and support creation of other citizen services through a User-centric Approach to improve their acceptance. The exploitation of both types of services will benefit from new business models, built upon local LV flexibility markets and novel barter-like mechanism, developed in STREAM. Presently, such services and business models don’t exist in either established- or developing power markets. The STREAM ecosystem covers their implementation, includes various stakeholder groups on all levels of power markets, from small-scale end-users, energy communities, ESCOs, service providers, to market- and system operators. To achieve the goals, STREAM consortium comprises relevant actors to capture the entire flexibility value chain within STREAM ecosystem from end users, energy communities to service providers, flexibility services providers, market operators, DSOs, and TSO, complemented by technology and research partners. The latter will supply knowledge in a form of STREAM tools that will enable the realization of STREAM ecosystem. They will be adapted, deployed, calibrated, and demonstrated in the 4 STREAM pilots that serve as a basis for benchmarking of STREAM ideas. They cover geographical, economic, size and type diversity of the consumers. While complementary, the pilots focus on a specific part of STREAM Ecosystem. The pilot partners have all the essential roles and authority to carry out the specified activities.

To achieve its energy goals EU needs to establish a geographically large market by initially improving its cross-border electricity interconnections. A geographically large market, based on imports and exports of electricity, could increase the level of competition, boost the EU’s security of electricity supply and integrate more renewables into energy markets. Electricity should, as far as possible, flow between Member States as easily as it currently flows within Member States, so as to increase sustainability potential and real competition as well as to drive economic efficiency of the energy system. To this end, FARCROSS aims to address this challenge by connecting major stakeholders of the energy value chain and demonstrating integrated hardware and software solutions that will facilitate the “unlocking” of the resources for the cross-border electricity flows and regional cooperation. The project will promote state-of-the-art technologies to enhance the exploitation/capacity/efficiency of transmission grid assets, either on the generation or the transmission level. The hardware and software solutions will increase grid observability to facilitate system operations at a regional level, exploit the full potential of transmission corridors for increased electricity flows that will facilitate transition to flow-based regional market coupling, consider cross-border connections and their specific ICT and grid infrastructure, planning to use a wide-area protection approach to ensure the safe integration of renewable energy sources into the grid, mitigate disturbances, increase power system stability. An innovative regional forecasting platform will be demonstrated for improved prognosis of renewable generation and demand response and a capacity reserves optimization tool will be tested to maximize cross-border flows. The non-harmonization of national regulation will be studied and measures will be recommended to avoid distortion of the technology benefits.

The rising decentralization of the energy system is unveiling an enormous opportunity for energy stakeholders to leverage on big data & AI technologies to improve decision making. There are however some barriers hampering the exploitation of this potential, such as the lack of standardized big data architectures for smart grids and regulatory frameworks not enabling data sharing. In that respect BD4NRG will i) deliver a reference architecture for Smart Energy, which aligns BDVA SRIA, IDSA and FIWARE architectures, SAREF standard and extend COSMAG specification to enable B2B multi-party data exchange, while providing full interoperability of leading-edge big data technologies with smart grid standards and operational frameworks ii) evolve and upscale a number of TRL 5-6 technology enablers, such as scalable sovereignty-preserving hybrid DLT/off-chain data governance, big data elastic pipeline orchestration, IoT/edge AI-based federated learning and multi-resource sharing tokenized marketplace, loosely integrate and deploy them within the TRL 7-8 BD4NRG framework iii) deliver a TRL8 open modular big data analytic toolbox as front-end for one-stop-shop analytics services development by orchestrating legacy and/or third party assets (data, computing resources, models, algorithms) iv) validate such framework through the delivery of predictive and prescriptive edge AI-based big data analytics on 13 large scale pilots, deployed by different energy stakeholders (TSOs and DSOs power network operators, aggregators, storage/renewable assets operators, local energy communities, ESCOs, power market operators, municipalities, financial institutions and ENTSO-E), fully covering the energy value chain v) setup a vibrant data-driven ecosystem through the SGBDAA Alliance, which will federate new energy data providers, attract SMEs for novel energy services provisioning through cascading funding and validate a hybrid energy/industry value chain supporting B2B joint digital platforms.