EnergyREV Call for Evidence: Digital Energy Platforms

EnergyREV is a UK-wide research consortium established to tackle the challenges around smart local energy systems (SLES). 

Within EnergyREV, our team’s first task is to understand today’s policy and regulatory landscape for SLES. To this end, we are undertaking a systematic review of relevant materials, and we need your help with this. 

Over the coming months, we will be crowdsourcing key policies, regulations and other rules that form the landscape for SLES. Each review will have a different focus. We’ve just published our first working paper on electricity storage and electric vehicles. More details at the bottom of this message.

Our hypothesis for this work is 

There are issues and gaps with the current policy and regulatory framework that prevent smart local energy systems from realising their potential benefits. 

This month we are looking at digital energy platforms. 

Digital energy platforms are an emergent aspect of the energy system. As such, nomenclature and definitions are not yet fully established. For this review, expert input is especially valuable to help characterise relevant digital energy platforms and identify current and emergent policies, regulations and rules.

This scope includes (but is not limited to):

• Local energy trading, including peer-to-peer platforms
• Grid services, including flexibility platforms
• Local balancing and optimisation, including virtual energy systems/virtual power plants
• Aggregator platforms, for any of the above and other purposes
• Local energy investment platforms, such as crowdfunding

There are also several crosscutting issues relevant to this review, including:

• Provenance (e.g. asset registration)
• Financial transactions
• Data privacy and security
• Automation (e.g. remote direct load control of energy assets)

We are asking for any materials on the policies, regulations and rules relevant to these topics in the context of smart local energy systems and our hypothesis.

How to respond

Please send literature or links to [email protected] along with a brief explanation of their relevance to the review, by 4th October 2019.

Our review series

This call for evidence is the second in our review series. The first looked at Electrical Storage and Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure. We have just published our findings in a Working Paper, which you can find here, or read the highlights in our blog post. We welcome your feedback on these outputs as it will help us improve future ones.