Last week on the 16th and 17th the REACT consortium gathered together in Vienna at AIT premises for the 8th General Assembly. The project is focused on the energy independence that goes hand by hand with energy transition, energy management and the creation at a later stage of energy communities that are able to manage their now energy generation and sharing.

During those two days progresses on the project were presented. Advances on the application has been swift and there are many questions that still need to be polished even though most of the project objectives have been achieved so far.

We got feedback from the 3 island communities in Aran, Carloforte and La Graciosa islands and their perceptions and advances carried out lately in the project.

We discussed about the forecasting tools and its use, optimisation methods, the grey/black box model, issues about the grid operation and fault detection. We also discussed lengthy about the energy asset controllers.

There are several points that stood out from the talks and presentations:

We are thinking on how important is it to compare the situation at the pilot sited before and after REACT development, so we need to compare all the collected data.

Strengthen the collaboration with the local grids operators in these final months ahead is a very important and necessary step forward.

We must also strive to promote the implementation of the solutions among the general population, specially considering the flexibilization of the energy market in the future.

Dissemination of the lessons learnt from the project and train end users are other two objectives for the near future.

We have to thank AIT team -and specially Stefan Übermasser– for hosting the event and made the meeting a very enjoyable one, and also for the interesting visit we had to the laboratory at the AIT premises, where we learnt a lot about energy storage and grid possibilities.