Smart City Neudörfl – RES² Community
Demonstration of a jointly designed renewable energy community to increase security of supply
This project has been completed. Access the preliminary Results Fact Sheet of Smart City Neudörfl – RES² Community here.
Austria’s cities and municipalities face a wide range of social, environmental, and economic challenges: the effects of climate change, demographic shifts, growing social inequalities, and the need to manage structural change and multiple global crises can pose a long-term threat to the sustainability of urban infrastructure. With the introduction of the Renewable Energy Expansion Act and the associated opportunity to operate energy communities for the local exchange of energy, this project has sought to link this model with resilience issues. Energy communities emerged, among other things, from the idea of creating incentives to make private capital available for the expansion of renewable energy through additional incentives, while also financially rewarding behavior that benefits the system (consumption during periods of high renewable energy production). These approaches were therefore incorporated into the “RES² Community” smart city project and are being researched in a real-world setting in the market town of Neudörfl in Burgenland.
A renewable energy community in Neudörfl was developed through the involvement of local stakeholders in a participatory design process and was thus tailored to the needs of future participants. Raising awareness about the energy transition and climate protection, the synergistic use of energy infrastructure to ensure a crisis-proof supply as a means of preventing blackouts, and new open communication standards for real-time data were all part of the project’s research activities. As a result, an energy management system based on real-time data from smart meters was implemented for the EEG.
