EP7 Podcast "Conversas com Boa Energia" | Andreia Carreiro, Diretora de Inovação CleanWatts Digital

In this podcast episode, Andreia Carreiro, Director of Innovation at CleanWatts Digital, discusses the role of energy communities in transforming energy production, sharing, and management. She explains that energy communities are collaborative forms of producing, sharing, and managing energy locally, involving end-users like citizens, companies, and municipalities. The key difference from the traditional model is that consumers become active participants, producing renewable energy, storing it in batteries, and managing electric vehicle charging. CleanWatts Digital provides a platform that coordinates all energy assets within a community, optimizing production, consumption, and storage. The first major project in Miranda do Douro highlighted the importance of energy literacy and the challenges of licensing processes. The platform offers different user profiles, from passive consumers to active prosumers who share energy and can earn revenue. The company joined the Aliança para a Transição Energética to collaborate with various stakeholders and test their platform in a real community managed by GALP, which allowed them to validate technology and explore dynamic sharing coefficients. The main challenge for algorithms is dealing with uncertainty and variability in renewable production and consumption. Looking to the future, energy communities could enable more integrated energy management, with potential for providing flexibility services to the grid. In a scenario with thousands of communities, there would be a transformation in energy infrastructure, but centralized systems and retailers would still be necessary, emphasizing complementarity.