COPOWER partners progress on the co-design of the Virtual Power Plant

The second COPOWER project partner meeting and the awareness raising seminar has taken place on the 12th and 13th of December 2023, hosted by Centria University of Applied Sciences in Kokkola, Finland.

Beside the usual project management, communication and finance discussions, the partnership focused the session on co-designing a community-based Virtual Power Plant (cVPP) model, specially, the technical details of the cVPP and the software platform requirements. Further discussions continued on defining and mapping local distributed energy resources (DER) and reporting the scale of local energy generation, demand and response and defining technology, tools, data and security. "During our meeting, partners have identified the benefits of being involved in a cVPP: savings, security, clean energy use, income and communities in peripheral areas who experience blackouts", explains Leah Ryan, ERNACT Project Leader for COPOWER. The partnership has agreed focusing on the DER (wind and sun, among others) and downing the line to add in factors such as information (such as weather or price) to make the cVPP smarter by using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm to enhance the performance of the system.

Young people and energy revolution seminar
Aiming to follow up with the discussion on youth empowerment in remote areas originated at the Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme's latest annual conference in Skellefteå (sweden), COPOWER partners invited 15 students from Centria University of Applied Sciences to a seminar to raise awareness among young people and investigate how they can lead the energy revolution.

COPOWER partner from Centria, Fabian Sander, led the seminar session that was structured into group discussions answering questions such as, 'How to get reliable energy revolution information? What channels give reliable information to young people? Give one example when disinformation was used against the energy revolution. Why are young people not asked when decisions are made that effect them? Why is it important to hear young people when decisions are made? What would you suggest to make young people more aware of those problems? What needs to be changed in our system that young people are more listened to?' This session enabled the NPA group to compare perspectives from the COPOWER partners to students or younger people's views. 

Please, stay tuned! This session was recorded and conclusions will be promoted soon.