As stated in the H2020 Work Programme of the societal challenge, moderating energy demand will be crucial in the current energy transition. Demand Response (DR) strategies represent an appealing value proposition to end-users, as it enables them to monetise the flexibility embedded in their peak demand through the minimisation of unnecessary or excessive electricity usage. This market opportunity sets the base for the Virtual Power Solutions (VPS)’ Kisense platform, which is an Active Energy Management System that delivers state-of-the-art DR technology for distributed blocks of buildings, providing new energy flexibility services as part of energy contracts and enabling micro-grid environments in liberalised energy market contexts. With that said, VPS engaged in an Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) with a major Spanish bank with activities across Portugal from 2013 to 2020. VPS equipped more than 100 bank branches with the Kisense platform, which enables the implementation of DR strategies, namely load shedding, load shifting and optimization of the energy contract towards RTP of electricity, which in approximately 15% annual energy saving (KWh) in 2016, when compared to the baseline year (2013). As for what VPS envisions for the future, the evolution of energy markets is accelerating in the direction of a greater reliance on Distributed Energy Resources, and the most promising strategy to address this trend is Virtual Power Plants (VPPs). In short, VPP creates better conditions for the introduction of new renewable energy sources and that is why VPS developed Kiplo, the first in the VPP platform market, designed to scale-up the Kisense platform. In conclusion, Kiplo will be in line with the growing European interest in open energy markets and Kiplo is expected to be a key tool in the future in this market segment.

The authors would like to acknowledge the support provided by the personnel at the Virtual Power Solutions office, namely, Pedro Marques, José Faria, Rodrigo Ferreira, e Nuno Lima, for all the fruitful discussions and suggestions that were pivotal to the development of this study, and the support provided by Marie Sklodowska-Curie project DREAM-GO (Enabling Demand Response for short and realtime Efficient And Market Based Smart Grid Operation - An intelligent and real-time simulation approach ref 641794) partners.