Luisa Matos presents WeSmart projects at the European CEAH conference ⚡
On December 10, 2025, Luisa Matos represents WeSmart at the first Citizen Energy Advisory Hub (CEAH) conference organized by the European Commission in Brussels. Her presentation, scheduled in the panel "What Energy Project do you want to realise?", traces WeSmart's journey: from an innovative pilot project in Brussels to large-scale deployment across 100+ SMEs in Belgium and a network of 500 school buildings.
Luisa Matos, former CEO of CleanWatts (European pioneer in energy communities in Portugal), is a strategic advisor to WeSmart.
A unique opportunity to share lessons learned from the field — the technical challenges overcome, strategic partnerships forged, and keys to moving from experimentation to industrialization.
From Greenbizz to 500 schools: a scale-up trajectory 🚀
The story Luisa Matos tells is one of progressive growth, where each project has validated hypotheses and refined our platform.
Greenbizz.energy: the full-scale laboratory ☀️
It all started in March 2023 with Greenbizz.energy, located in a passive building in the Brussels-North business district. This project brings together 25 participants — 20 SMEs and around forty offices — around a 240 kWp solar infrastructure producing approximately 240 MWh per year.
But Greenbizz is more than just a solar energy sharing project. It has become a true test bed for energy flexibility:
- A recently installed 121 kWh battery storage system optimizes collective self-consumption and smooths demand peaks
- Smart EV charging stations add a layer of complexity — and opportunity — to flow management
- Integration with Sibelga, the Brussels grid operator, paves the way for frequency regulation and grid balancing services
Scaling up: a network of 500 schools 🌱
Building on this experience, WeSmart now supports a project of an entirely different scale: equipping 500 school buildings in the Brussels region with solar panels and EV charging infrastructure.
This project represents far more than multiplying Greenbizz. It's about creating a true multi-site virtual power plant, capable of:
- Aggregating flexibility from hundreds of buildings to participate in energy markets
- Deploying battery storage in a coordinated manner
- Exploring V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid) potential with school vehicle fleets
- Offering large-scale demand response services
Technical challenges overcome 🔋
Behind these successes lie obstacles we've had to learn to manage across projects. The most time-consuming remains integrating data from grid operators: each DSO has its own methods — SharePoint downloads at Sibelga, daily emails at Fluvius, APIs at Enedis, simple monthly CSV files elsewhere. Building a platform that works across multiple territories means constantly adapting to this patchwork.
Another ground-level reality is the gap between real-time and official data. Validated readings from DSOs often arrive 30 to 45 days after actual consumption. You constantly have to juggle between the need for instant monitoring to optimize flows and the requirement for accuracy in billing — two timeframes that never quite align.
Finally, going from 25 participants to 500 buildings radically changes the game. Each site becomes a special case: different meters, varying connection statuses, heterogeneous data formats. The challenge is standardizing without losing the analytical depth that makes our support valuable.
Key success factors 💡
Looking back, several elements made the difference. First, having a facilitating grid operator. Sibelga played this role in Brussels — their experience with energy communities and willingness to develop data-sharing solutions considerably accelerated Greenbizz's implementation. Without this cooperation, the project would have taken months longer.
The multi-stakeholder partnership model also proved decisive. Greenbizz was co-developed with Citydev, CSTC, and Sibelga — an alliance that brought institutional legitimacy and risk sharing. For the school project, support from experienced sector advisors helped navigate public institution decision-making processes, with their specific constraints and timelines.
Finally, the Brussels regulatory framework has offered fertile ground since 2019: significant reductions on grid fees for locally shared energy, and now alignment with EU Directive 2024/1275 making solar mandatory on public buildings. Projects that anticipate these requirements enjoy a real competitive advantage.
Our story at the CEAH conference 🇪🇺
We started WeSmart with a simple conviction: the energy transition won't happen only through large industrial projects. It will also come from thousands of local communities producing, sharing, and optimizing their energy together. The problem? Nobody really had the tools to manage that at scale.
Greenbizz was our first real test. Twenty-five participants, one building, lots of unknowns. We learned enormously — sometimes painfully. Late nights debugging Sibelga data imports. Endless discussions with regulators to understand what we were allowed to do or not. Participants who couldn't understand why their bill didn't exactly match what they saw on the dashboard.
But we held on. And most importantly, we proved it worked.
Today, when a network of 500 schools trusts us to deploy 20 MW of solar and create one of Belgium's largest virtual power plants, we can measure how far we've come. This is no longer a pilot project — it's industrialization. And that's exactly what we wanted to demonstrate: that energy communities can scale.
The CEAH conference, at Les Ateliers des Tanneurs in Brussels, brings together European stakeholders who believe in this vision. Luisa will carry our message there: yes, it's complicated. Yes, there are technical, regulatory, and human obstacles. But project by project, we're building the foundations of a more decentralized, more resilient, more equitable energy system.
Want to write the next chapter of this story with us? Let's talk.---
WeSmart: From experimentation to industrial-scale deployment of energy flexibility. 💚
