The Swedish pilot engages households with heat pumps, EV chargers, PV systems and batteries to deliver flexibility services to the power system. The pilot uses the INDEPENDENT platform to develop services that allow homeowners to generate revenue from their energy assets without needing additional hardware or compromising comfort.

The initial focus is on aggregating residential heat pumps to provide ancillary services to the Transmission System Operator (TSO). Specifically, the pilot targets the mFRR (Manual Frequency Restoration Reserve) market, with 15-minute activations during system imbalances. The plan is to connect 100 households with NIBE heat pumps, controlling them from the CheckWatt virtual power plant using the INDEPENDENT Aggregator Energy Management Package.

In later phases, the pilot will explore stacking ancillary services by combining heat pumps with PV and battery assets. This will enable the simultaneous provision of multiple grid services, for example, mFRR via heat pumps alongside FFR (Fast Frequency Response) and FFCR (Frequency Containment Reserve) via batteries.

Finally, the pilot aims to reduce household power-tariff costs by optimising the coordinated operation of heat pumps, PV and battery systems, helping homeowners avoid exceeding power and network capacity limits.

Pilot partners

NIBE
CheckWatt

The German pilot focuses on optimising electricity consumption across both industrial facilities and private homes through energy and flexibility management solutions provided by Consolinno.

By using the INDEPENDENT Customer Energy Management Systems Package, the pilot unlocks and coordinates flexibility within existing grid and market constraints, while preparing the ground for future flexibility services and market opportunities.

• On the industrial side, the glass manufacturer Irlbacher Blickpunkt Glas GmbH is already optimising its energy consumption based on weather and solar forecasts, as well as day-ahead electricity prices, with intraday price integration planned as the next step. The pilot also explores additional flexibility options by leveraging the site’s thermal storage potential, enabled by the building’s Concrete Core Activation.
• The residential use case engages homes equipped with PV systems, heat pumps and EV chargers. Here, the focus lies on local optimisation driven by price signals, while ensuring compliance with German regulation §14a EnWG, which allows grid operators to temporarily limit the power output of EV chargers and heat pumps to prevent grid congestion.

The pilot use cases are further tested and refined through co-simulations conducted at fortiss labs, together with Bosch and Consolinno, in which real hardware is connected to simulated models of buildings and parts of their energy systems.

Pilot partners

Consolinno
fortiss
Bosch

The Finnish pilot explores how flexible demand from HVAC systems in supermarkets and apartment buildings, as well as industrial processes in manufacturing facilities, can be optimally integrated into energy markets.

Today, most demand response relies on spot price optimisation (shifting consumption to the cheapest hours once prices are published). While effective at a small scale, this approach becomes problematic when scaled up, as it can distort prices, create new demand peaks and increase system imbalance. In this case, a more sustainable solution is to integrate the forecasted flexible demand directly into the market bidding process, resulting in prices that better reflect reality.

The pilot is using the INDEPENDENT Customer Energy Management Systems Package to integrate the buildings’ energy and automation systems, managed by Caverion and the aggregator management system operated by Volue. Several use cases are explored to determine the most effective market participation strategies:

• Two S-Group supermarkets in Oulu: Flexible demand is modelled and used by the cooperative’s electricity retailer Suomen Voima Oy to bid directly into the day-ahead and intraday markets.
• Apartment building in Helsinki: In addition to spot price optimisation for cost and CO₂ reduction, flexibility is traded in a local flexibility market for small-scale assets, in collaboration with GLocalFlex.
• Logistics solutions manufacturing site in Järvenpää: Flexibility from a new powder coating line, using oven temperature ranges,​ is modelled and offered in Fingrid’s ancillary services markets, alongside spot-price-based consumption shifts.

Insights will help define optimal market-based pathways that enable large-scale adoption of demand-side flexibility services in buildings and industry.

Pilot partners

VTT
Caverion
Volue

The Slovenian pilot focuses on optimising energy resources across residential homes, small businesses and industrial facilities in the Celje region.

The INDEPENDENT Customer Energy Management Systems Package is used to control PV systems, batteries, EVs and heating/cooling devices in response to signals such as energy prices, network tariffs, CO2 intensity and local PV generation.

The objective is to automate the optimisation of local loads and generation to lower costs, increase self-consumption, reduce CO2 emissions and improve resource-use efficiency.

A key feature of the platform is the automated modelling of the energy resources, using advanced machine-learning techniques, including Neural ODEs. These models enable optimal model-predictive control, accurate baseline estimation and robust forecasting of flexibility.

The pilot will also investigate flexibility services comprising:

• Local flexibility markets, where consumers and prosumers offer consumption or production flexibility to DSOs/TSOs via aggregators
• PV and battery flexibility packages, where prosumers provide battery flexibility to retailers, supporting optimised participation in retail energy markets

Pilot partners

ECE
Elektro Celje
Jozef Stefan Institute
Reduxi by Amibit
Smart Com