Unlocking the Future of Energy: SYNERGY’s Open Call Winner – LOGIKERS

IIn the realm of energy innovation, the EU-funded SYNERGY project represents a bold step forward, aiming to create a transformative Big Energy Data Platform and AI Analytics Marketplace. This visionary initiative serves as a nexus for diverse energy-related data, synthesizing information from IoT statistics, sensors, and energy markets, while simultaneously elevating AI capabilities. The project’s ambition extends to demonstrating this ground-breaking system across five European countries. Integral to SYNERGY’s evolution is the Open Call, a strategic mechanism designed to select and validate pioneering experiments and services. Among the distinguished recipients of this call is LOGIKERS, a forward-thinking entity prepared to unveil their journey within SYNERGY, shedding light on their project’s significance and the transformative impact it promises to deliver to the energy sector.

Can you start by giving us an overview of the app developed for the SYNERGY Open Call? What sets your app apart from other proposals in the Open Call, and what unique benefits does it bring to the energy sector?

“The idea behind SMARTPAIRING is to offer a software as a service in charge of optimal sharing between prosumers and consumers in a P2P electricity market. The application automatically collects data from users, performs all the analytics to find the perfect match and proceeds to perform the exchange securely using blockchain-based smart contracts. 

In addition, the role of DSOs is considered, since, apart from the few cases of fully private micro-grids that have a pure P2P system, current energy models usually include DSOs as a participant in energy exchanges, either as a buyer of the surplus or as a supplier of the missing energy. 

During the 8-month project period, we have managed to develop and deploy SMARTPAIRING making use of the SYNERGY platform functionalities as well as the external stand-alone deployment of optimisation and smart contracts modules. After the validation and testing phase, we can affirm that the solution shows a very efficient and promising behaviour, providing an appreciable benefit to both prosumers and consumers, yielding an increment of the profits and a reduction of the costs with respect to the base case of buying/selling energy from/to the grid.”

What motivated you to participate in the SYNERGY Open Call, and how do you believe your service contributed to the overall objectives of the project?

“We felt that SYNERGY as a Big Data platform was the perfect basis on which we could implement SMARTPAIRING. In addition, the Open Call allowed us to: 

  • Work closely with a consortium of entities with extensive experience and expertise in the energy sector. 
  • Being able to access large datasets with which to test our application. 
  • Make use of analytics tools to improve SMARTPAIRING’s capabilities. 
  • Access to funding”

How the activities in SYNERGY Open Call allows you to innovate in your business?

“SYNERGY Open Call has meant the perfect opportunity to deploy SMARTPAIRING. On the business side, we have used the months dedicated to the Open Call to advance our goal of bringing SMARTPAIRING to market in the coming months. To this end, we have worked on the following aspects of the application: 

  • Value proposition. 
  • Sale channels. 
  • Revenue streams. 
  • Key partners. 
  • Cost structure. 
  • Customer segments
  • Key activities 
  • Key resources”

Which category or group of stakeholders can benefit from your SYNERGY App?

“The target audiences for SMARTPAIRING will be: 

  • Consumers. 
  • Prosumers. 
  • Energy communities. 
  • Energy cooperatives. 
  • DSOs”

How do you plan to leverage the services developed in SYNERGY in your daily business?

“LOGIKERS aims to keep developing this application in order to be a production ready and profitable solution as business main line. In the coming months, we will focus in improving the application on a technical level in order to arise an exploitable version of SMARTPAIRING that is ready to reach the market.”

The SYNERGY project aims to develop a Big Energy Data Platform and AI Analytics Marketplace. How do you think this platform will revolutionize the energy sector, and what role does your developed app play in this transformation?

“The energy market is changing rapidly: decarbonisation, decentralisation and digitalisation are utterly transforming the industry. The recent trend towards the increase in distributed self-generation capabilities by prosumers has led to a new model of electricity exchange that is expected to grow tremendously in the coming years: peer-to-peer (P2P). Innovative tools and platforms are essential to respond to the flexibility sharing challenge, whether at the consumer level or between energy communities, and that is where SMARTPAIRING application comes in: it works as an efficient, dynamic and smart solution for electricity trading between prosumers and consumers, that offers robust data analytics for optimising the match between supply and demand offers, power forecasting analysis and blockchain technology for safe transactions based on blockchain.”

Conclusion

In the realm of energy innovation, LOGIKERS’s SMARTPAIRING application, developed through the SYNERGY Open Call, marks a significant stride towards transforming peer-to-peer electricity markets. Leveraging the SYNERGY platform’s robust capabilities, SMARTPAIRING facilitates optimal sharing between prosumers and consumers using blockchain-based smart contracts. This innovation not only enhances efficiency but also offers cost reductions and increased profits. LOGIKERS’s proactive involvement in SYNERGY showcases their commitment to advancing the energy sector. As they refine SMARTPAIRING for market readiness, their contribution epitomises the platform’s potential to revolutionise energy exchange dynamics, driving flexibility and innovation in an industry undergoing rapid transformation.

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The SYNERGY Journey comes to its end…

After 48 months of intense work and collaboration, the SYNERGY project concludes its activities in December 2023! Upon reflection, we are quite proud of our triptych of achievements, embracing both the technical and the business/demonstration perspectives: 1 Platform + 12 Energy Apps + 21 Demo Cases.

1 SYNERGY Platform

Our most outstanding accomplishment could be no other than the SYNERGY Platform, a cutting-edge Big Data Platform and AI Marketplace, that targets any stakeholder of the electricity data value chain. In a nutshell, the SYNERGY Platform facilitates (I) efficient data management of previously disperse and non-interoperable energy data, (II) trustful data sharing within the electricity data value chain, and (III) actionable data-driven insights extracted by data analytics pipelines that are fully configurable (by data scientists or technical/business users). The SYNERGY Platform is also complemented by 30 Pre-trained Analytics Solutions for specific domain-related problems, i.e. Demand Forecasting, Flexibility Forecasting, Generation Forecasting, Occupants Behaviour and Comfort Profiling, and Predictive and Preventive Maintenance.

Over the last 30 months (since its beta release was made available), the SYNERGY Platform has been extensively leveraged by its users as evidenced by its impressive usage statistics (as of 19/12/2023): 1.391 Data Check-in Jobs –  1.414 Datasets (Available in Marketplace: 674) –  1.900 Analytics Pipelines (with 288.806 executions) – 1.635 Analytics Results (Available in Marketplace: 71) –  318 Trained Machine Learning / Deep Learning Models (Available in Marketplace: 71) – 468 Single Contracts – 65 Bundle Contracts, containing as part of the bundle 502 contracts –  1.469 Retrieval Queries –  182 Users. 

In fact, the overall feedback on the SYNERGY Platform has been overwhelmingly positive! The Platform has been praised and met with particular enthusiasm by internal users (within the consortium), external users (with direct access for developing external energy applications as part of the SYNERGY Open Call) and external stakeholders (engaged through interview sessions as part of the SYNERGY Living Labs activities):

“SYNERGY platform is really intuitive and easy to use!” quoting the feedback of a user from an open call application.

“There is substantial added value and great potential for a big data platform like SYNERGY in the market.” quoting the statement of another external stakeholder.

12 SYNERGY Energy Apps

Built on top of the SYNERGY Platform, our 12 Energy Applications have been released and are currently at the disposal of: (a) Network Operators & RES Plant Operators, (b) Energy Retailers & Aggregators, and (c) Facility Managers, City Authorities & ESCOs. In order to address their differentiated needs, the SYNERGY Asset Management Tool Suite, the SYNERGY Energy as a Service Tool Suite and the SYNERGY Optimized Energy Performance Management Suite are now in full operation. In addition to internal users (from the SYNERGY demo partners), the final release of each application has been successfully presented to 11 Living Labs workshops with external stakeholders. 

The overall feedback and reception of each application has been really encouraging for their functionalities and overall positioning!

21 SYNERGY Demo Cases

From a business perspective, 21 Demo Cases have been consolidated for the 5 demo countries participating in SYNERGY, namely Greece, Spain, Austria, Finland and Croatia, each of them making use of the SYNERGY Platform and a different set of the 12 Energy Apps. 

In total, 58 Business KPIs have been defined and assessed throughout 2 demo run phases to quantify the impact of our SYNERGY solutions on the actual stakeholders’ operations. Although concrete examples cannot be revealed due to confidentiality reasons, the evidence from all KPIs is indisputable: SYNERGY offers substantial added value (compared to the baseline situation) and clear business benefits, allowing each demo partner to operate more efficiently, and facilitating them in their transition to the data sharing and AI era. Such findings are reinforced by 16 Business Models cross-cutting the scope of the different demo cases that have been proposed and whose effectiveness and economic viability has been confirmed with the demo partners. 

From a more technical perspective, 42 Technical KPIs have been also evaluated, concerning the performance, functional suitability, operability, reliability and compatibility among others, and it has been observed that for the SYNERGY Platform and the Energy Apps, the achieved values are well above the threshold limits that had been set in our evaluation framework.  

Conclusion

We are definitely now in a position of identifying the quick wins and the pain points associated with big data platforms for the electricity data value chain while having derived significant lessons learnt towards the future exploitation activities of the SYNERGY consortium! Just to mention a few, indicative experiences: 

  • The needs of data asset providers vs the needs of data asset consumers cannot be always reconciled. Designing generic solutions (baseline analytics, energy apps) always requires flexibility and adaptations on the data asset consumer side. 
  • Data interoperability is ever present and cannot be addressed in a one-off solution – “design to anticipate change” as there is no data model/standard/ontology that addresses all needs of the energy domain.
  • When monitoring multiple data check-in jobs and managing a significant number of datasets, data observability is instrumental towards troubleshooting problems and ensuring reliable, high-quality data.
  • Experimentation with analytics and AI requires planning, inspiration, time, collaboration and, of course, significant resources.

Note: The functionalities of the SYNERGY Platform or our results can be demonstrated on demand! If you are interested in finding out more, do not hesitate to send an email to our technical coordinator at: fenareti@suite5.eu