Optimally planning the energy flows across multiple sites becomes more important, e.g. for orchestrating the aggregated flows due to grid congestion, or for implementing energy sharing. This approach can break bottlenecks and increase savings - as such, energy communities are an important topic for the European Commission.

In this talk, we present our ongoing work towards a Community Energy Management System (CEMS) with FlexMeasures. We discuss our architectural approach: optimizing the flows for each sites by themselves and then adding an orchestration layer on top. This approach is being tested in a project with TNO in the Netherlands. The goal is to manage neighbourhoods as well as commercial sites optimally.

In addition, we want to discuss how scalable any CEMS system can be, as many circumstances and conditions often vary, per site and per energy community. We chose our CEMS architecture approach for this reason, but versatility has been a design principle for FlexMeasures since the beginning. In this talk, we will showcase a complete example script of a setup orchestrating a few homes. This script is written with the FlexMeasures client and is also open source. FlexMeasures being 100% scriptable is a design choice that lets many developers built just what they need in energy intelligence.

This is also an opportunity to visit some fundamental improvements we have made in the last year in the documentation of FlexMeasures and its flexibility options - both for developers and users.