Dr Dimitrios Tzovaras, director of the Information Technologies Institute at the Centre for Research and Technology – Hellas based in Greece, oversees DELTA in his role as project coordinator.

“The untapped potential of demand response around Europe is huge, and it will become increasingly important and valuable as Europe continues to see extreme weather conditions as a result of climate change. With DELTA, one of our key goals is to make it easier for aggregators to manage their portfolios of prosumers and consumers. This will allow aggregators to realise the benefits of demand response in small to medium scale settings.

“Europe makes up the world’s third largest electricity market and we need to find innovative ways to ensure our electricity supply is secure, smart, integrated and reliable. Our research will develop a next generation demand response framework for every consumer of electricity, regardless of size and empower them to actively engage in everyday energy transactions by providing aggregators with game changing tools.

“Our consortium has brought together experts from research and industry and based across 8 EU countries. Our vast amount of previous experience and knowledge is what will make DELTA an impactful and future-proof project. I hope this first newsletter will give you an insight into our project, our motivations and goals as well as some of our activity in the opening months of the project”.

Stakeholders have been actively engaged with through questionnaires and discussion workshops to accurately define the user and business requirements. This is helping to understand the technical needs of the DELTA system and how its adoption can address challenges in the existing energy market. Currently we have identified 3 business cases and 4 use cases.

Having the business and use cases is continually helping to define system requirements within DELTA’s architectural design. These are transforming into functional and non-functional requirements which will in turn develop the concrete and interconnected components of the DELTA architecture, including the functionalities, dependencies, construction components and communication requirements.

Set against the development of the DELTA framework is understanding the energy market and the regulations in play relating to demand response around Europe. Significant effort has been made to understand this setting in regards to the countries where DELTA will be tested; the United Kingdom and Cyprus. Selected other countries with both developed and under-developed demand response regulation have been analysed as well.

Creating a DELTA brand which will be recognizable to our stakeholders has been an important part of the project in the opening months. Creating communication material, setting up our online presence and defining our strategy for communicating over the course of the project has been undertaken. All of this is to ensure that our stakeholders remain up to date and informed about the project.

While the above areas have been the main focus in regards to our deliverables, plenty of work has been done in other areas of the project. The DELTA ontology network, analyzing current and future demand response strategies and beginning to look at how blockchain will drive the system have all been investigated, discussed and improved.

At the end of November DELTA and eDREAM, another H2020 funded project, joined forces to form a workshop for both projects’ key stakeholders. The workshop, which took place in London, was a chance to present the project objectives and motivations as well as provide stakeholders the opportunity to engage in an open discussion session with project members on the issues which mattered to them the most. It is hoped that this type of workshop will become a regular occurrence, make sure to follow DELTA on Twitter for updates – @delta_eu.

CERTH, in their role as project coordinator, has also attended a number of events to showcase DELTA in these early months. Projects members from CERTH have presented the DELTA core concept at:

2019 is shaping up to be a busy and productive year for the project. With two important technical deliverables in January we will be starting the year with a clear path of what will need to be achieved to maintain our progress. Our January deliverables are concerned with business scenarios and use cases and demand response strategies and mechanisms for the DELTA framework. These will provide a basis for how the DELTA framework becomes a reality, leading up to the prototype design of the DELTA fog-enabled intelligent device – the physical device which will be present in homes and businesses and funnel vital energy consumption data to the DELTA virtual nodes.

With all of the partner research up until now and continuing into the future you can expect to see and hear more from DELTA at events and presentation around Europe. Showcasing our progress as well as engaging in two-way communication with our stakeholders is high on our 2019 agenda as we look to build what will be a game-changing framework for energy markets.