The islands of the future: green, digital and smart

Islands have become the ideal testing ground for new technological solutions leading to a digital, green and sustainable energy system.

The EU’s islands are home to 16 million people, around 4% of its population. However, they are also popular tourist spots and tend to rely on fossil fuels for electricity, transportation and heating. This, combined with environmental and geopolitical concerns, means speeding up the energy transition is now more important than ever.

That is why the EU is funding innovation projects, such as Islander, led by Ayesa.

Islander is an innovation project that began at the end of 2020. Its goal is to further the decarbonisation of islands through the smart management of energy.

One of the key aspects of the project is the implementation of an Ayesa-developed platform, Gridpilot, which manages renewable energy generation and storage in an integrated manner. The initial site of the project is the island of Borkum, which is aiming to be carbon free by 2030, although the system is set to be rolled out on four other islands.

With an eight-million-euro budget, the project will last four years (until 2025) and involve seven European countries represented by eleven organisations.

As part of Islander, a pilot system that uses seawater to provide heating in the winter and cooling in the summer will be installed in a building consisting of 100 apartments.

Another important innovation is the demand response services offered by Ayesa. These will provide prosumers with power through the installation of hydrogen storage systems, as well as photovoltaic panels and lithium batteries in 30 homes and 3 buildings. All this infrastructure will be connected to Ayesa’s IT platform.

Another key to achieving the decarbonisation of the island is the use of electric vehicles. As such, bidirectional charging stations (V2G and V2H) will be installed, these being integrated with the rest of the infrastructure. This will allow electric vehicles to become mobile energy storage devices, which will work together with the rest of the assets to provide energy to both the grid and end users.

This project is a continuation of the work of the EU’s H2020 NETfficient project, which saw Ayesa develop Gridpilot, a smart platform unlike any other for managing distributed energy assets.

Gridpilot manages renewable energy generation and storage across various producers and assets, automatically deciding with perfect timing when electricity should be consumed or sold. What’s more, by using artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT), it does this in a controlled and secure manner, something that is necessary to operate in the market.

In terms of the technology ecosystem, artificial intelligence plays a critical role in the scaling tools for renewable infrastructure and energy storage used in our application, as well as the automatic operating of all these assets in a coordinated manner. Ayesa’s system combines machine learning algorithms with mathematical modelling and new optimisation algorithms, such as stochastic and distributed technologies, to forecast energy generation, prices and consumption.

Likewise, the acquisition, storage and use of high-quality data and rapid responses are extremely important to the efficient working of the system.

Furthermore, the technology offered by Gridpilot will maximise the scalability and integration of artificial intelligence technologies.

As part of the project, we are also working on a real-time interface to provide end users with better insights.