The paradigm shift proposed by HESTIA will enable residential DR services through: (i) exploitation of energy demand flexibility by engaging the end consumers in demand-side management (DSM) activities, and (ii) valorisation of energy efficiency in multi-carrier energy dispatching and optimal operation of building systems, as part of a hybrid form of demand response which combines both explicit and implicit DR mechanisms. As a driving force, HESTIA will leverage the consumer engagement as part of cooperative DR strategy at the community level, i.e. clusters of individual consumers and prosumers, by joining the Citizen Energy Community (CEC) and Renewable Energy Community (REC) concepts together. To motivate the consumers to actively participate (e.g. by manually influencing the energy demand curve), HESTIA will leverage the financial (ensuring the cost savings), environmental (improving the environmental impact) and social drivers (related to making participation meaningful, e.g. through social race and community sentiment), but, at the same time, cross-fertilize them to maximize the impact. The key strategy to ensure solutions will work well in an everyday context of consumers, as that HESTIA will involve the users (residents) in the designing of the solutions through participatory co-design processes. Altogether, HESTIA will create community engagement methodology and organisational tools with a high acceptance, that can be replicated and provide the corresponding tailored toolsets for a broader rollout.

R2M as an integrated and multi-disciplinary engineering company, will serve as Innovation Manager of the project. R2M will contribute to HESTIA by leading the validation and exploitation activities work package. This will consider setting the validation methodology, IPR management and market analysis (WP7). In this regard, R2M will lead the solution scale-up and replication planning for the “follower” communities. R2M will also contribute by bringing the building (e.g. grey-box) models for optimized MPC control algorithms necessary to establish the link between advance optimization algorithms and actual control and management of equipment in situ (WP4). Support in setting the data protection and security measures of the overall HESTIA platform will be provided by R2M as well (WP5). Finally, R2M will also coordinate the cooperation and clustering activities associated with cross-cutting issues (WP8).