SMART-Mess Innovative metering solutions for community-based energy and community-driven energy supply

In the field of community-based energy, new supply models are emerging, such as tenant electricity projects, community-based building energy supply, and, in the future, energy sharing. These models place special demands on metering concepts and billing systems – while clearly defined metering and billing processes exist for traditional energy supply arrangements, standardized, legally compliant, and cost-effective solutions are lacking for community-based models. The project focuses on evaluating metering concepts for tenant electricity models as well as for community-based building supply. 

In parallel, the researcher will examine initial forms of energy sharing will that go beyond traditional tenant electricity models: in the future they should enable the shared use and distribution of locally generated electricity within neighborhoods or energy communities using the public power grid.

In addition, the project will also address future demand for flexible residual power purchases at dynamic prices, as well as the controlled feed-in of surplus power into public grids, for example via battery storage or flexible electrical consumers. The research team will integrally incorporate these aspects into the development of metering and billing concepts to ensure that the solutions developed meet not only today’s but also the foreseeable regulatory and market-based requirements of the energy transition.

The goal is to create practical, legally sound, and economically viable solutions for metering, billing, and data communication in these new supply models. Therefore, the project addresses existing obstacles in metering concepts and billing practically: It develops transferable recommendations for citizen energy communities, other operators, and service providers.

The project is funded as part of the DATIpilot CommunitE-Innovation.