As renewables grow, flexibility becomes the missing link between clean energy solutions and grid reality.
The energy transition isn’t just a race to deploy renewables and become more energy efficient. It’s also a quest to build systems that adapt. And there is good news: Europe’s energy transition is accelerating. Wind and solar energy are leading the change towards the EU’s goals to have 42.5% of energy come from renewables by 2030. But as variable generation from renewables grows, so does the challenge it brings. How do we keep the benefits of the renewables and the grid balanced when both production and withdrawal curves are facing important variations? And how do we manage to keep it both efficient and economical? STUNNED is taking on the answer to both questions, where energy flexibility lies at the heart of these challenges as a solution. Both forms of flexibility, implicit and explicit, can each play a role in the solution.
What is implicit & explicit energy flexibility?
Implicit flexibility is quiet and occurs when households, tertiary building managers, or devices shift their habits in response to price signals. Imagine charging an EV when solar is at its peak to increase self-consumption and adjusting heating to save costs. Explicit flexibility is driven by network needs, e.g., aggregators allocating resources to stabilize the grid and trading services in energy markets. This helps ease pressure on the grid and enables better demand planning. Together, implicit and explicit flexibilities form the backbone of a resilient, renewable-powered Europe and have the potential to reshape the way we think about energy.
Yet Europe’s potential remains uneven. Some countries, like Spain, have achieved widespread smart meter coverage, enabling implicit flexibility at scale. Others lag behind, with adoption rates near zero and a long way to go.
Explicit flexibility faces its own paradox: while its market value is projected to triple, from €4 billion in 2024 to €12 billion by 2030, only a handful of countries allow demand-side participation today. These gaps are not just technical. They reflect cultural, regulatory, and systemic diversity that we also experience within the STUNNED project. While we see a positive regulatory tendency on the Spanish market, and an overall common understanding and support in France, Italy, on the other hand has more national regulatory boundaries to work with.
The future of energy is flexible
To unlock the potential of implicit and explicit energy flexibility, energy communities are more than local cooperatives; they are living laboratories of flexibility. They empower citizens to become active participants by shifting consumption, sharing resources, and integrating storage and renewables at the neighbourhood level. Through implicit flexibility, communities adapt their behaviour to price signals, optimizing self-consumption and reducing costs, seeing energy use through a different lens. With explicit flexibility, they aggregate resources, batteries, EVs, and heat pumps to provide services to the grid, turning local action into systemic stability that benefits all participants.
To succeed and further push the importance and application of energy flexibility, we need STUNNED and other European projects to design the solutions of the future. Only by turning local challenges into shared knowledge, testing real-life scenarios across borders, and creating scalable models can we empower energy communities to lead the transition.
Therefore, if there’s one thing left to say, it’s this: energy flexibility isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the architecture of tomorrow’s grids.
