The EU project +CityxChange concludes this month, and during the five-year project period, Aneo has significantly participated in the sub-project to establish a local energy and flexibility market in Trondheim.
A Visionary Project
With 10 participating countries, 32 partners, and Trondheim as the lighthouse city, Aneo has contributed by establishing, operating, and managing the local market. Project manager Bernhard Kvaal admits that the project presented startup challenges:
– It was difficult to find a way to do this that convinced regulatory authorities, Tensio, Statnett, and Elhub – the latter had to program a special solution for us to establish this market.
Need to Utilize the Grid Better in the Future
The core of the +CityxChange project has been to demonstrate that it is possible to create neighborhoods that produce more energy than they consume over a year. In Trondheim, the projects have been located in the districts of Brattøra and Sluppen.
Kvaal points out that there are no incentives today that allow for producing and sharing electricity between buildings, as done in this project. When the available grid capacity is exhausted and new consumption cannot be connected, new solutions and technologies need to be employed – and the lack of grid capacity is becoming a significant problem in Norway and other countries.
– There is still room in the Norwegian grid if we can largely recreate a market where we use the grid smarter, Kvaal points out.
AI Has Been a Part of the Success
Kvaal believes that what has been achieved in this innovation project probably wouldn't have been possible when the applications were written more than five years ago.
– At that time, we didn't have an AI department with us. They have been important to this project, and now we cannot see that we would have solved what we set out to achieve without the AI department.
