Demonstration of a participatively designed renewable energy community aimed at increasing resilience

Austria’s towns and municipalities face a wide range of social, environmental and economic challenges: the impacts of climate change, demographic change, growing social inequalities, and the need to manage structural change and multiple global crises can pose a long-term threat to the infrastructure that supports these towns. With the introduction of the Renewable Energy Expansion Act and the associated opportunity to operate energy communities for the local exchange of energy, this project has sought to link this model with resilience issues. Energy communities emerged, among other things, from the idea of creating incentives to make private capital available for the expansion of renewable energies through additional incentives, whilst also financially rewarding behaviour that benefits the system (consumption at times of high renewable production). These approaches were therefore adopted in the ‘RES² Community’ smart city project and are being researched in a real-world setting in the market town of Neudörfl in Burgenland.

A renewable energy community in Neudörfl was developed through the involvement of local stakeholders in a participatory design process and is thus tailored to the needs of future participants. Raising awareness of the energy transition and climate protection, the synergistic use of energy infrastructure to ensure a crisis-proof supply as a means of preventing blackouts, and new open communication standards for real-time data were all part of the project’s research activities. As a result, an energy management system based on real-time data from smart meters was implemented for the EEG.