Testing energy sharing models in Extremadura

The benefits of this scheme are multiple, from the economic benefits of optimizing the amount of energy self-consumed to the environmental benefits of replacing the energy taken from the grid by renewables.

Funded by the EU cross-border programme Interreg POCTEP, INNOINVEST aims to promote the use of renewable energy, energy storage and innovative technologies for building insulation. The pilot action developed by AGENEX includes these 3 fields of work.

The use of solar energy for electric self-consumption is a well-known technology that achieves significant savings, but it also has an important downside: it must be consumed at the time of generation. A solution is to include a storage system, but it increases costs and implies energy losses. So, the optimal solution is to find complementary patterns of consumption and use the maximum amount of the energy produced. This is the approach followed to design the AGENEX pilot.

This pilot scheme gathers 7 public buildings located nearby: several administrative buildings, a hall of residents, and a data processing centre. 4 buildings have PV panels on their roof and one has PV panels on its façade. In addition to the vertical panels, this building has an External Thermal Insulation Composite System (ETICS). Finally, a small lithium-ion battery was installed. Due to the complementarity of the buildings and their energy demand, they are able to consume almost all the energy produced. The monitoring system allows to obtain the maximum benefit of the energy produced, providing also very valuable data related with their habits and allowing to modify their behaviours.

A very positive impact is the optimised performance of the installations. The innovative insulation system has reduced the energy demand of the archive building by 15%. Overall, the shared scheme is achieving 30 to 40% of energy savings and has reduced the electricity bills by more than 50,000 EUR/year.

The positive results highlight the benefits of shared schemes and will be a demonstrative action to implement this model in other administrative buildings which are currently under analysis. It also proves the potential for energy communities. Therefore, AGENEX is setting up an advisory office (OTC) in the region to provide support and enable their creation. Additionally, the agency has just kicked-off the TRANSCOM project to transfer this initiative to a cross-border scope, establishing a network of energy communities on both sides of the Spanish-Portuguese border.

This best practice is extracted from our publication ‘Sustainable Regions in Action‘. Discover more best practices here!