Tools should be developed to support demonstration of the energy community paradigm shift within the mentioned context using suitable digital platforms for putting the citizens in direct contact with each other, suppliers, aggregators and other involved market stakeholders and to increase prosumers’ satisfaction and participation.
Projects should link citizens, technologies, regulation and markets together.

Dedicated demonstrations should be set to demonstrate the use of these interactive tools to contribute to real-time optimization of Distributed Energy Resources and the facilitation of investment decisions at household or community level in RES or demand response. To get the acceptance of different energy technologies in civil society, these demonstrations should be built on SSH approach to take into account the social and behavioural dimension at the stage of their design, also considering safety issues of electrical systems. As a result, these demonstrations are expected to aim to increase the understanding of consumer’s behaviour (e.g. by understanding how they are providing demand side flexibility as close as possible to real-time). They should also aim to create innovative tools and tailored solutions to empower prosumers, to help them to realise energy communities and finally pave the way for the energy transition.

The tested solutions should be able to reconciling the top-down market developments with the bottom-up changes in the market arrangement and participation. Solutions are expected to be as replicable as possible and to be demonstrated in a variety of geographical locations in different Member States/Associated Countries representing very different social and economic situations. In addition, regulatory / administrative barriers and possible solutions should be assessed as part of the projects. To do so, projects are expected to design, develop and test incentives for market participants to react to system conditions according to location and time, while at the same time considering maximization of their economic benefit. Projects should develop the entire functional chain from data collection and elaboration, to local flexibility needs and user-centric compensation enabling the active participation of prosumers.