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On 3 June 2026 the European Commission presented its Technological Sovereignty Package, which places open-source software and the digitalisation of energy at the centre of EU policy. It includes the Cloud and AI Development Act, an Open Source Strategy, and a Strategic Roadmap for Digitalisation and AI in the Energy Sector. The rationale is stated plainly: Europe depends on suppliers outside the bloc for more than 80% of its key digital technologies. CELINE is a working instance of the alternative, an open-source toolbox for energy communities, developed over the past year and already running in three countries.

The problem it addresses: making energy community software simple and accessible

Energy communities operate real infrastructure: shared solar, storage, metering, sometimes heating networks. What most of them do not have is a software team. The tools on the market tend to be either closed products that carry running costs and lock you into one vendor, or systems complex enough to need specialist staff to keep them working. Neither fits an organisation run by its own members.

CELINE is built around a different requirement: software that runs without constant attention or dedicated staff, and that a community can understand well enough to make decisions about. That is what calm technology means in practice. Complex underneath where it has to be, undemanding on the surface. The constraint shaped every part of the toolbox.

What the toolbox does: gather, interpret, act.

The toolbox does three things.

It gathers data. Energy data is normally scattered across meters, weather services, and grid platforms. The toolbox pulls it into one place, with each participant keeping control of their own data.

It makes sense of that data. A digital twin, a working model of a home or a whole community, runs alongside AI to produce forecasts and recommendations: when demand will peak, when to store or use energy, what a given change would cost or save.

It puts the results in front of people. Dashboards show the current state at a glance. A plain-language assistant answers questions in ordinary words and shows its sources, so the answers can be checked rather than taken on trust.

Each layer is meant to be usable without a technical background and cheap to keep running.

Open by design

Building this in the open is a deliberate choice, not a detail. Open source means the code can be inspected, audited, reused, and improved by anyone. There is no closed product and no single supplier holding the keys, which also means no licence fees and no lock-in.

It also forces the tools to connect to things they did not ship with. Think of standard plug sockets: any appliance fits, and you are not tied to one brand. CELINE's tools use common, open formats, so they connect to systems a community already runs and to tools added later. The toolbox already brings smart meters, grid awareness, public weather, and climate data into a single picture.

The practical effect is that the community is in control: it can switch tools, add new ones, leave, and take its data with it. Sharing works the same way: the community decides what to share, with whom, and on what terms. This is the model the EU's new Open Source Strategy is calling for, and CELINE is a concrete instance of it rather than a proposal.

Three communities

CELINE runs in three demonstrators, each addressing a different problem.