In the goal to develop and test new business models for smart energy service integration, stakeholder feedback is essential to ensure that the models developed and used meet the needs of both service providers and customers and the proposed improvements are reasonable and properly addressed.
Between the winter and spring 2023, the LIFE project InEExS thus organised the first series of roundtables, led by the project partner NTUA, to engage relevant stakeholders (energy providers, service providers, local/regional/national authorities, energy agencies, citizen’s associations, building owners, financiers, etc) and gather feedback on the business model development, the validation of smart services and the replication of results.
The five innovative services that will be tested by InEExS in the next three years all have in common the metered energy savings within the framework of the article 7 of the Energy Efficiency Directive and blockchain technology. The initial business models were discussed and advanced in the almost 20 meetings held with the 80 stakeholders involved.
Each business case discussion touched upon different topics, having in common the business model concept design, energy management and data protection matter, energy tokens for energy transactions and to incentivize self-consumption, how DLT affects or not the current contracts of the industries involved and their customers, how it will be use in the business cases in terms of digitalized contracts, quantification and verification of energy savings, and the opportunities and challenges to implement energy efficiency services for end consumers .
Other more specific discussion points instead went through the accessibility of the technologies to different age ranges, the developments required in the implementation of the project to be used for energy efficiency and monitoring of photovoltaics, user awareness and what kind of services are needed for new energy communities that can benefit from project results and the importance of incentivising the engaged users through energy tokens versus the lack of the legal framework that would allow these tokens to be monetized.
After the closing of the first round of roundtables, the second round, focussing on the finalisation of Intermediate Business Models and on how the DLT will be explored in each one of the cases, is already under development: more and more expertise will be collected from identified stakeholders in different countries to make the InEExS innovative smart energy services bulletproof and thus ready to be integrated and replicated.
If you want to know more about each case, visit our webpage: https://ieecp.org/projects/ineexs/
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