REACT is a four-year research project funded by the EU program Horizon 2020. The aim is to enable island communities to pursue a cooperative energy management strategy, providing them with a scalable ICT platform to manage their renewable energy and storage-based electricity infrastructure.
The costs of power supply in remote areas or geographical islands can be many times higher than that of the public grid, being, e.g., fuel transport costs or submarine cable interconnections major cost factors. Furthermore, security of supply and grid stability of small isolated grids poses a challenge.
In this context, the integration of increasingly cost-effective renewable energy sources (PV, wind) has been economically feasible and technically interesting for years. If, however, the share of these fluctuating renewable energies exceeds a certain threshold, both smart and fast control systems and the integration of stationary storage systems become indispensable to ensure that the power supply can always meet the demand curve and that system stability is guaranteed.
These central topics are the focus of the Horizon2020 project "REACT", in which Fraunhofer ISE plays a leading role in the revision of the supply strategies of eight European geographical islands, the planning of the required storage capacities as well as the development and implementation of optimized strategies for controlling battery storage. The overarching goal here is to maximize the degree of self-sufficiency and, thus, minimize supply costs and emissions.
The implementation of a central ICT platform based on in-house developed open source energy management systems will enable new business models in which both customers and grid operators can further optimize the use of installed storage and other flexibility options, for example to further reduce electricity costs.
The implementation of renewable energy plants and battery storages in several municipalities on three selected pilot islands will demonstrate the benefits and profitability of the "REACT solution" and the developed business model. Within this project, the island communities will be informed and involved from an early project stage. The tasks for disseminating the project results will aim at replicating and scaling up the developed model on these and on further five follower islands.