At the end of November 2024, ATELIER had the privilege to join POCITYF, NEUTRALPATH and the ASCEND project for an interesting and insightful webinar focusing on the topic of building Energy Communities. With representatives from each project, important aspects were covered ranging from challenges and solutions, lessons learned, navigating Energy Communities in a specific region, to investment and business in the realm of Energy Communities.
Providing real-time examples on the subject, one of the esteemed webinar speakers and ATELIER representative Eva Winters from TNO took a closer look at the Positive Energy District in Buiksloterham, Amsterdam, pointing out the regulatory exemption that made it possible to build and operate a private network with one collective connection to the public grid. This derogation turned out to be very helpful later on and is thus an important factor to highlight.
It was also emphasized that due to congestion in the area, Republica only got ¼ of the requested capacity during daytime in Winter. Because of the collective connection to the grid, all the individual connections behind that single large connection were able to share the transport capacity. By sharing the capacity, all connection could be facilitated. If there would not have been a private grid, only the household connections would have been given transport capacity and the large ones would have had to wait until the grid was reinforced or capacity would become available.
With important insights from our experts and looking further ahead, sharing capacity will soon become available in the Netherlands for large connected customers connected to the public grid, which will be organised via special ‘group transport agreements’. Republica was one of the first successful examples of sharing capacity.
Author: ATELIER project