Energy

I-NERGY. Artificial Intelligence for Next Generation Energy

I-NERGY is an EU-funded project developing Artificial Intelligence for Next Generation energy, reinforcing the services layer of the AI-on-Demand (AIoD) platform.

About

About

I-NERGY is a three-year EU-funded project aiming to evolve, scale up and demonstrate innovative AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) Energy Analytics Applications and digital twin services.

More specifically, on top of the I-NERGY framework, the project defines AI energy analytics services and digital twins grouped under the following categories:

Energy Commodities Networks (AI for energy networks optimised operation)
Distributed Energy Resources (AI for RES generation, buildings, districts, and communities)
Energy Efficiency and Non-energy related Services (AI enabling synergies/implications on other energy and non-energy domains)

Services and digital twins are developed and tested in the context of 9 pilot hubs and 15 related use cases. These pilot hubs range from optimal risk assessment for energy efficiency investment planning to optimised management of grid and non-grid-owned assets, improved efficiency and reliability of electricity networks operation, and new socially and environmentally sustainable business models.

The challenge

AI spreading in the energy sector is expected to dramatically reshape the energy value chain in the next few years, by improving business processes performance, while increasing environmental sustainability, strengthening social relationships and propagating high social value among citizens. AI is expected to radically transform the energy sector, redesign and shape the energy value chain and revolutionise the way through which the Electric Power and Energy Systems (EPES) community is undertaking the business processes. However, uncertain business cases, fragmented regulations, standards immaturity and low-technical SMEs workforce skills barriers are actually hampering the full exploitation of AI along the energy value chain. To bridge this gap, I-NERGY will deliver:

An open modular framework for supporting AI-on-Demand in the energy sector by capitalising on state-of-the-art AI, IoT, semantics, federated learning, analytics tools, which leverage on edgelevel AI-based cross-sector multi-stakeholder sovereignty and regulatory preserving interoperable data handling.
Financing support through Open Calls to third parties SMEs for new energy use cases and technology building blocks validation, as well as for developing new AI-based energy services, while fully aligning to AIonDemand service requirements and strengthening the SME competitiveness on AI for energy.

EGI-ACE has supported the I-NERGY project since April 2022 and the collaboration is intended to continue until the end of the project and beyond. The main added values offered by EGI-ACE are related to the close contact with the technical staff, and the high quality support provided, but it is worth to noting its European dimension, specially for those projects supported by public funds.

The solution

Thanks to the collaboration with EGI and its technical support, the I-NERGY project was provided with a valid, scalable, reliable, stable environment to host the I-NERGY component. The final solution provides within the project architectural layers (Data services, AI Trained models, Energy Analytics Application), the realisation of specific Technical enablers to facilitate the development and testing of Services aimed at energy chain efficiency.

Technical enabler:

I-NERGY data management services
Common data model
Model evaluation and serving framework
Trained AI models deployed as services
Visual analytics and Reports

Services:

Energy Load Forecasting Service
Predictive Maintenance Service
Operation planning
Digital Twin for DER / DPSIM
Digital Twin for Electrical Communities
Energy Flexibility Forecasting and Demand Response
Anomaly Detection in citizen patterns from Smart Meters
Energy Efficiency Action Plans Evaluation and Prioritisation
Decision Support for energy action plans and policies
Forecasting Changes in Solar Radiation

Project layers

I-NERGY Data Services layer provides the I-NERGY full interoperability allowing the integration, pre-processing, semantic annotation and streaming of heterogeneous data, guarantying traceability, provenance tracking and accountability of the I-NERGY data and external data source

I-NERGY AI Trained Models layer facilitates the development, training, evaluation and serving of the project ML models to easily be used in new services.

I-NERGY Analytics Services & Application layer constitute the foundation of the I-NERGY integrated solution developing and validating the selected pilot cases / small-scale experiments, descriptive, predictive and prescriptive/anticipatory data analytics along a variety of significant applications, by making use of AI-based ML Suite.

I-NERGY Security and Access Control layer to guarantee security mechanism within the I-NERGY ecosystem below the architecture building blocks.

Services provided by EGI

EGI Cloud Compute and the cloud-based EGI Online Storage were used to deploy the main components of the I-NERGY Infrastructure.
EGI Check-In served to enable users’ registration and authentication mechanisms.
I-NERGY benefited from technical consultancy to fully profit from the EGI solutions.