Energy communities allow photovoltaic system operators to share the solar energy they produce with consumers. Lower Austrian company energyfamily GmbH has designed an online tool to make the set-up, management and billing of energy communities as simple as possible.
“There are many unanswered questions about energy communities; plenty of bureaucratic hurdles to overcome; and billing also has a certain degree of complexity and involves cumbersome processes,” says Lukas Brenner, founder and Managing Director of energyfamily GmbH in Amstetten. Its online platform www.energyfamily.at is intended to lower the hurdles to setting up energy communities and to make the sharing of electricity from PV systems as easy as possible for producers and consumers, whether private individuals, companies, or municipalities.
Three energy community models
There are currently three models in Austria for sharing photovoltaic power generated by one or more plants: In a collective generation system (GEA), solar electricity is shared within a building; renewable energy groups (EEG) are designed for producers wishing to share electricity with their immediate neighbours (local level) or within a region (regional level); and citizen energy cooperatives (BEG) allow the electricity they generate to be sold to users throughout Austria.
Multi-award-winning web platform
energyfamily helps people find the energy community best suited to their needs. The company advises and connects producers and consumers, while its online platform provides energy community members with software to automate and simplify the management and billing of electricity transfers.
“We are very proud of the awards we have received for our platform, most notably the Copernicus Masters Austria Award which we received from ESA in 2022, and the Magenta #TUN Sustainability Award which we were awarded in 2023.”
Boost from research cooperation
With the coveted Copernicus Masters Award under its belt, energyfamily started a new research project in 2024 to investigate how satellite data can help predict solar radiation and thus the production of solar energy. This predictive energy management could be used to further optimise energy consumption in energy communities, and balance out production and consumption.
The www.energyfamily.at web platform was launched following a research cooperation with the University of Applied Sciences FH Wiener Neustadt funded by the FFG. “Together, we examined the technical and economic feasibility of our planned online tool, as well as its legal foundations,” says company founder Lukas Brenner. “This research collaboration has really given us a boost.”