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