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xx/07/2026
Making Digital Energy Tools Work for Local Communities
Helping turn Europe’s digital energy resources into services local actors can use, manage, and trust.
Local energy community-based initiatives increasingly depend on data from buildings, meters, grids, weather services, markets, and users. CELINE explores a practical question in this changing landscape: how can existing European digital tools be connected so they support local energy services?
This matters because community energy services are used by many different groups:
• municipalities,
• energy communities,
• SMEs,
• researchers,
• practitioners,
• public authorities,
• service providers, and
• citizens.
These services need to be technically sound, but also clear, manageable, and relevant to everyday local needs. The key challenge is not only to create more digital tools. It is to connect existing tools in ways that local actors can use, manage, and trust.
The key challenge?
The key challenge is not only to create more digital tools. It is to connect existing tools in ways that local actors can use, manage, and trust.
Celine as a practical use case
CELINE is a Horizon Europe project focused on digital services for community-scale energy. It provides a concrete setting for exploring how digital tools can support local energy planning, coordination, participation, and decision-making.
In practice, these services involve many actors.
• Municipalities may need better planning information.
• Energy communities may need tools for participation and coordination.
• SMEs and service providers may need reliable data exchange.
• Grid actors may need information that supports flexibility and day-to-day operational decisions.
Each actor works with its own data, tools, responsibilities, and constraints. A useful digital service needs to bridge these differences without making participation too complicated.
Why this matters?
For municipalities, SMEs, public authorities, researchers, and community actors, the issue is practical: digital services must fit real responsibilities, skills, and operating conditions.
Europe already has many building blocks
Europe already has many policies, programmes, standards, shared data systems, and research projects that support digital energy services. The main challenge is not to create more tools, but to make existing ones easier to combine and reuse.
European rules on data sharing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital markets, and electricity systems influence how digital energy services are designed and operated. Initiatives such as Gaia-X, the European Open Science Cloud, the Digital Europe Programme, and the Connecting Europe Facility also offer useful reference points for trusted data sharing and reuse
Research and innovation projects add practical lessons. Projects such as PARMENIDES, EDDIE, DECODIT, BIPED, COMMUNITAS, Sun4All, and COMANAGE show what works, what is difficult, and where better alignment is needed when digital energy ideas are tested in real settings.
Across this landscape, the same questions keep returning.
• How can data from different systems be understood correctly?
• How can information be shared safely?
• How can local actors build the skills to use digital services?
• How can useful tools continue after a pilot project ends?
Europe already has many policies, programmes, standards, shared data systems, and research projects that support digital energy services. The main challenge is not to create more tools, but to make existing ones easier to combine and reuse.
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