The CREATORS project, one of the EU projects that ep has been involved in, came to an end in August 2024, after four years.
CREATORS, (‘Co-creating advanced Community Energy Systems’), was designed to develop tools and services that could help accelerate the development and implementation of community energy systems. Advancing community energy systems beyond the concept stage to investment and implementation faces a number of barriers including: relatively small project size; various mixes of energy technologies; multiple stakeholders including public sector, private sector and third sector; and importantly lack of project development and financing capacity.
CREATORS supported the development of ten community energy systems across Europe, and ep assisted in the application of these tools to the ten projects as well as additional several projects in the UK, by: providing development skills and ‘critical friend’ assistance; developing specific tools and services that can speed up the development and modelling of community energy systems; and beginning the process of commercializing these tools and services – essentially offering ‘Community Energy Systems as a Service’. The tools include: energy system simulation software and business modelling. The projects included technologies such as: solar PV, batteries, EV charging, Vehicle to Grid (V2G), wind power, and using local waste heat in a network.
ep worked on several aspects of this project. First of all, it used its experience of leading the development of the Investor Confidence Project (ICP) Europe to embed the ICP Protocols and best practice Project Development Specifications into all of the projects being worked on CREATORS. The ICP Protocols provide a best practice, standardized approach to project development, that has been proven to reduce project risks and transaction costs. EP led the European Horizon 2020 consortium that developed the ICP Europe system between 2015 and 2019. EP also provided techno-economic analysis of all the projects and provided advice on financing projects. It also engaged with possible investors to socialize the type of community energy systems projects being worked on.
ep Assets is now applying some of the CREATORS tools to help develop advanced micro-grids for commercial and residential developments.