LECaaS

The LECaaS project was approved by the Walloon government as part of the Pôle MécaTech's call 33. It aims to standardize tools for energy communities that can be deployed on a large scale, especially for residential or mixed industrial and residential communities.

The LECaaS project aims at removing the blocking points to the deployment of large-scale energy communities for end-users. To this end, it brings together multidisciplinary skills in community management as well as security and data processing.

The project aims to implement an open and interoperable solution that addresses these issues: Local Energy Communities as a Service (LECaaS).

Indeed, to set up a low voltage energy community, involving residential and/or industrial, multiple technical and communication skills are required.

The LECaaS project will provide an open and interoperable solution bringing together functionalities such as sizing, simulations, implementation, optimization and securing of community data in order to replicate the model at large scale to various users.

Currently, development solutions are aimed at industrial projects with a small number of players. They are often not adapted to residential and low voltage users.

We want to remove this problem to the development of energy communities in Europe.

The objective of the LECaaS project is to propose a digital "as a service" solution for the management, simulation and optimization of renewable energy communities, interoperable with other existing solutions.

The WeSmart platform, the main foundation of LECaaS, will be connected to the modules developed by UMons, UCLouvain and Multitel, in order to provide the best possible user experience. Laborelec will develop a data exchange and orchestration layer allowing for intensive and massive data exchange.

The expected benefits of LECaaS for community managers and participants are numerous:

- the WeSmart platform will allow an optimal management of the CE thanks to a set of innovative services

-A digital twin will allow to simulate the energy flows within a CE and to evaluate both its operation and the performance of the optimization algorithms, to test in accelerated time the behavior of the members of the energy communities, to test the consumption in computing resources of the energy management solution in front of numerous communities and finally, to generate simulated data used for the training of the algorithms.

- Finally, kits for project leaders and ambassadors will help to communicate and involve participants within the Works Councils in order to encourage the commitment and support of members

The project will be tested and deployed on a pilot CER in Frasnes-lez-Anvaing in cooperation with IDETA and ORES, before its deployment on a national and European scale.