REScoopVPP tools
Our project has built up a set of tools for flexible energy communities. These are branded under the name COFY for Community Flexibility. Learn more about our COFYbox, COFYcloud-Community data & COFYCloud-Busines Support.
The COFYbox : Our home gateway
The COFYbox is a Home Energy Management System (HEMS), hosting a series of containerised applications in a managed fleet, to enable local control of high load devices, such as electric vehicle charge points, heat pumps, immersion heaters and solar/battery installations. The system is fully open source to promote replication and adaptation.
Technical features:
- A fully customisable local energy data dashboarding, allowing device automation and scheduling.
- Full remote access for both end users and community administrators.
- Full access to real time service logs for community administrators.
- Able to integrate hundreds of ESA device models.
- A Virtual End Node (VEN) to receive, respond and act on OpenADR explicit demand response signals.
- End point agnostic data forwarding.
COFYcloud - Community data
(1) Private cloud space with personal dashboard
A cloud based application that can receive and store COFYbox measurements and visualise them towards the user.
Technical features:
- Device Provisioning Service (DPS): an REST-based service that (new) devices can use to validate their membership and receive credentials.
- Data Hub: A Data bus where devices send their data towards and which processes and stores it into the databases.
- Identity Service: Users can use this service to log in to the system, either using a combination of login and password or via 3rd party logins.Visualisation Web App: A web application where all measured data of the device is visualised.
COFYcloud - Community data
(2) Aggregated community data
A cloud-based application that visualises measurements and KPIs from the pilot sites and manages the deployed COFYboxes.
Technical features:
- GDPR consent: Data is only added to the community and used according to a consent by the private data owner.
- Identity Service: Users can use this service to log in to the system, either using a combination of login and password or via 3rd party logins.
- Visualisation Web App: A web application where all aggregated data of the community are visualised.Data Aggregation Functions: Back-end processes that aggregate data per community whenever devices send new data.
COFYcloud - Business support
(1) Forecasting for communities: enda
A set of algorithms aimed to forecast the demand, generation, imbalance and flexibility needs of a large portfolio of energy assets and customers.
Technical features:
The enda package provides a set of functions designed to perform electricity consumption and production forecasts, based on the H2O and scikit-learn backends. In particular, it enables to :
- manipulate contracts-like and time-series data
- build machine-learning training and forecast datasets
- perform consumption forecasts using several portfolio trends
- perform production forecasts using a standard plant approach
- perform backtesting and KPI calculations
- compute a flexibility signal based on the imbalance forecast
enda is open source and its code is freely available on Github. Several examples of the way to perform a forecast are also exposed on Github.
COFYcloud - Business support
(2) Future Price Matrix
Personal flexibility signals for community members.
Technical features:
- Data Collectors: Back-end functions collect the relevant data for all community members: solar forecasts, dynamic prices etc.
- Price Matrix Calculation: A back-end function that calculates price matrices.Price Signal API: A REST API that serves signals to devices.
COFYcloud - Business support
(3) Powershaper OpenADR Flex
An Energy Community Aggregator Service platform utilising OpenADR: the open source protocol for automated demand response, to send control signals to the COFYbox. PowerShaper OpenADR Flex enables Explicit DSR for remotely controlling Energy Smart Appliances (ESAs), to respond to grid strains and support the good operation of the network when there are dips in supply or peaks in demand, and reduce fallback on fossil fuels.
Technical features:
- Web-based user dashboard for households to opt out of events and view report data for individual and community flexibility supplied per explicit DSR event.
- Ability for users to opt back into events by selecting Rejoin Event if circumstances change.
- Notifications of upcoming turn-down/turn-up events sent via SMS or email dependent on user preferences.
- Built on Django: a secure Python based web framework.
- Baselining algorithms to calculate ‘normal’ usage of baseline period, from which to calculate supplied flexibility via difference between actual usage.
- The PowerShaper Home Assistant integration is uniquely linked to the user so that the binary sensor change is configured according to their flexibility preferences.
Open source and cooperative tools
Our team as been searching on existing intiatives and how to enhance collaborations among them
Our map of open source or cooperative tools
Our team has mapped existing tools within the co-operative & open source worlds
>> Download the detailed overview
Collaborate on open source tools for the energy transition
REScode is a repository of software projects aimed at enhancing collaboration among self-minded programmers
