At first sight, family homes with solar panels, a small office building, and a farm with irrigation pumps seem very different. In STUNNED, however, they share a common role. The French energy flexibility demonstrator shows how each of these can become part of a flexible energy community. These communities do more than just consume electricity. They actively shift and coordinate their energy use to better match renewable production, reduce costs, and create value. The demonstrator tests this approach in real-life conditions. People live, work, and run businesses in these buildings. This makes the results practical and directly applicable.
What the french demonstrator actually consists of
The French demonstrator comprises four separate energy communities situated in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.
Two of these are residential demonstrators comprising two and three individual households in each energy community, respectively. Some households have their own photovoltaic system and residential battery system, enabling them to act as prosumers, while others are simply consumers. In addition to classic equipment, households are equipped with a water heater, a heat pump system, and an electric vehicle (EV) charging station for load flexibility.
The third is a tertiary demonstrator, an office building owned by two companies for office and R&D activities. It features a photovoltaic system, HVAC, and electric water heaters.
Finally, the last energy community is an agricultural demonstration site consisting of a farm equipped with a photovoltaic system and irrigation infrastructure (pumping station and hose reels), a house, and a B&B, equipped with electric water heaters, heat pumps, and a charging station for electric vehicles.
In other words, the demonstrator isn’t a uniform site made up of the same types of buildings. Instead, it’s a complex system of four mini-worlds with their own constraints, opportunities, and daily realities.
Self-consumption first, collective value second
The demonstrator first aims to maximise individual self-consumption. It then increases collective self-consumption within the energy community. Finally, it boosts overall revenue through self-consumption, local energy billing, and market services. The French energy flexibility demonstrator achieves this using the STUNNED platform. The platform connects to a local gateway at the site. It monitors and controls flexible loads such as heating and cooling systems, heat pumps, electric vehicle charging, water heaters, and irrigation pumps.
The local gateway acts as a translator and coordinator. It connects building devices with the wider community logic. This approach enables energy flexibility without turning each site into a complex engineering project.
One Demo, Many Realities
No energy load is the same. That sounds obvious, until trying to implement one approach across:
- Two small groups of homes
- A working office building
- And a farm operating an irrigation infrastructure
Even the two residential sites have entirely different needs and energy loads that need to be considered. This underlines that there isn’t and can’t be a one-size-fits-all flexibility solution.
Instead, what works is a setup that’s flexible by design. Flexible enough to handle different device mixes, different operating priorities, and different levels of “readiness” in each building.
The current state: a mix of “done” and “work in progress”
The French demonstrator clearly shows that building flexibility isn’t a quick fix, enabled by a single installation. Moreover, it’s a sequence of practical steps, of which some are already completed, others are ongoing:
- Each of the energy community’s structures is already established and operational.
- A technical audit is performed on each demonstrator to characterise the system in detail and identify the potential flexibility of the equipment for control purposes.
- Several architecture scenarios are being studied with the aim of integrating the local gateway with as few modifications and as little cost as possible.
- The identification of new devices (switch/power supply/energy meter) for real-time monitoring and control has been almost completed for residential demonstrators and is underway for tertiary and agricultural demonstrators.
- The installation, configuration, and testing of the HW/SW Home Assistant tool as a local gateway for residential demonstration are almost complete and operational.
- Several open actions, such as data collection for calculating KPI, data exchange between levels, etc., are currently in progress.
A real-life example: how sharing can work in a small residential community
As an example, below is how energy is shared among members of the Energy Community for one of the residential demonstrators, based on available annual data. HOUSEHOLD #1 participates in the Energy Community as the sole producer by injecting its PV production surplus to the grid, with priority given to selling energy to HOUSEHOLD #2, and selling the remaining surplus within the framework of a subsidised feed-in contract, as shown in the figure below.
Yearly volumes of electricity produced, consumed, and exchanged within and at the boundaries of one residential demonstrator [MWh]
Integration Is What Makes Flexibility Scale
The French demonstrator shows a key challenge: flexibility cannot scale when systems do not integrate properly. This is why the project actively tests different architecture scenarios. The goal is to connect the local gateway with minimal cost and effort. Strong integration enables reliable data exchange, effective monitoring, and practical control across different building types. In this context, interoperability is not just a useful feature. It is the key factor that turns flexibility from a prototype into a scalable solution.
The main lesson from the French STUNNED demonstrator is clear. There may not be a universal energy community, but there can be a shared way to enable them. This starts by focusing on immediate value, such as self-consumption. At the same time, each site must keep its own operating patterns. To scale successfully, the system must invest in integration. This shifts the focus from promises to real results. It connects system layers reliably and collects the data needed to measure impact through key performance indicators. In the energy transition, the biggest challenge is not the idea. The real challenge is making it work everywhere.
