After a challenging and lengthy period of legal negotiations, the partners have now agreed and signed a multilateral NDA. This agreement permits the confidential and secure sharing of data from different sensors and measurement tools, such as smart meters. With access to this Big Data, service providers will now be able to continue and finalize the development of the 18 services. This means the project can now launch the trial and validation process of the services in respective pilot sites.

The implementation plan of the services on a large scale at five pilot sites across the EU (provided in D7.1), which will also support replicability for other data providers and service users, is the first step in our long-term goal to create success stories that will be of huge value to project target groups and stakeholders and enable them to grasp the business value proposition of each of the services developed. Further, the implementation plan will strengthen the foundations for the marketplace development, where data providers, service providers and service users will be able to access and share data and contract services. 

Each of the five pilot sites is collaborating on defining a common set of tools and procedures, set up to follow a common deployment approach across all sites. These tools and procedures will then be applied in the following pilots, three of which are DSOs (Estabanell, Spain; ELCE, Slovenia; and OEDAS, Turkey), one Micro-grid (VUB, Belgium), and one EV charging infrastructure (NUV, Denmark).

In the coming months, progress will be reviewed regularly with pilot leaders to ensure that the data obtained from them is being shared and transmitted correctly to service providers so that they are able to analyze it and apply it to service development work. The 18 services being developed will enhance the efficient planning, management, operation and maintenance of energy distribution grids and associated assets. These innovative AI-based services will be commercially available from the BD4OPEM project open energy marketplace.