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29/07/2026
Turning Europe’s Digital Energy Tools into Services Local Communities Can Trust
What CELINE reveals about connecting data, standards, governance, and participation at community scale.
CELINE explores a practical question: How can Europe’s existing digital energy resources be transformed into services that local actors can use, manage, and trust?
Community energy services involve many different groups:
• municipalities,
• energy communities,
• SMEs,
• researchers,
• practitioners,
• public authorities,
• service providers, and
• citizens.
The services need to be technically sound, but also clear, manageable, and relevant to everyday local needs.
Imagine a municipality trying to plan a local energy service. Building data sits in one system, meter readings in another, grid constraints are managed elsewhere, and citizens need clear answers about how their information will be used. Each resource may be valuable on its own, but the service will only work if these pieces can be connected, understood, and governed together. This is the practical challenges being explored by CELINE: how can Europe’s existing digital energy resources be turned into services that local actors can use, manage, and trust?
The central challenge
The goal is not merely to develop more digital tools, but to connect and adapt existing ones so that local actors can use them confidently, manage them effectively, and trust how they work.
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.
Celine as a practical use case
Why this matters?
For municipalities, SMEs, public authorities, researchers, and community actors, 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 challenge is to make them easier to combine and reuse.
European rules and regulations 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
The opportunity
Europe does not need to start from zero. The opportunity lies in combining and reusing existing building blocks more effectively.
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?
Research and innovation projects add practical lessons
The challenge is making tools work together
Many digital tools and data models have been built for specific purposes. Some describe electricity networks. Others focus on buildings, sensors, city data, energy markets, user services, or rules for data access and use.
Each can be valuable, but a community energy service often needs several of them at the same time. A service may need to combine building information, meter readings, grid data, weather data, user preferences, flexibility options, market signals, and access rules.
For CELINE and similar initiatives, the practical question is not just which resources exist. It is where they can be reused, where they need to be adjusted, and where new links are needed.
Community energy services need a way to combine information from several domains, rather than relying on one tool, one data source, or one standard.
Shared meaning is essential
Interoperability is often understood as the ability of systems to exchange data. That is necessary, but it is not enough. Systems also need to interpret the data in a consistent way.
For example, a meter reading, a building asset, or a flexibility offer may be described differently by a grid model, a building tool, an IoT platform, a market system, or a digital twin. The same data can mean different things depending on where it comes from.
This is why shared meaning matters. Data should be able to move between systems without losing context or becoming difficult to interpret.
Europe already has many relevant standards and shared vocabularies. Some focus on electricity networks, while others describe buildings, sensors, city data, or energy services. Examples include CIM, CGMES, SAREF, Brick, Building Topology Ontology (BOT), CityGML, SSN/SOSA, IFC, Open Energy Ontology (OEO), and BIGG Ontology.
The acronyms are less important than the principle: no single model covers everything a community energy service needs. The task is to choose the right models for the right purpose, adapt them to specific use cases, and maintain the links between them over time.
Data should be able to move between systems without losing context or becoming difficult to interpret.
Digital twins and data spaces as connectors
Digital twins and data spaces are important for CELINE, but neither is a complete solution on its own.
A digital twin is often described as a digital copy or representation of a physical system. In local energy settings, it can also help bring together information flows, shared vocabularies, rules, and user-facing services in one place.
A data space is an organised way for organisations to share data under agreed rules. Its value depends on clear answers to practical questions: who can access data, how it can be used, how sources are recorded, and how responsibilities are tracked.
A digital twin is often described as a digital copy or representation of a physical system. In local energy settings, it can also help bring together information flows, shared vocabularies, rules, and user-facing services in one place.
A data space is an organised way for organisations to share data under agreed rules. Its value depends on clear answers to practical questions: who can access data, how it can be used, how sources are recorded, and how responsibilities are tracked.
These building blocks need to be easy enough for local actors to understand and manage, not only for technical specialists. In practice, a digital service depends on all three: technical connections, shared meaning, and clear rules for data use.
Trust has to be practical
Energy data can be personal, commercially sensitive, operationally important, or politically significant. Trust cannot remain a general principle. It has to be built into how services are designed and used.
For CELINE and related initiatives, this means asking clear questions early.
• Who can access which data?
• What can they use it for?
• Can the source be checked?
• Can decisions be checked later?
• Can rules for using the data move with it when it is shared?
These questions affect participation. If rules are too complex, too costly, or too dependent on specialists, smaller organisations and community actors may struggle to benefit from digital services.
Addressing these issues early turns broad ideas such as trust and control over data into practical choices about consent, identity, access rights, data history, checking decisions, and usage control.
Energy data can be personal, commercially sensitive, operationally important, or politically significant. Trust cannot remain a general principle. It has to be built into how services are designed and used.
What community energy services need?
Community-scale energy projects should not have to build all their technology from the ground up. A more realistic approach is to combine existing European building blocks in ways that are modular, transparent, and maintainable.
• Clearly define what the service covers, including the actors, data, decisions, and exchange boundaries involved.
• Adapt standards and data models to concrete use cases, rather than trying to use large models in full.
• Treat links between models as long-term assets that need ownership, versioning, testing, and maintenance.
• Build rules and responsibilities into the technical design, including access conditions, data history, and usage restrictions.
• Plan for continuity beyond individual project cycles, so useful tools and methods can keep supporting local energy ecosystems
A more realistic approach is to combine existing European building blocks in ways that are modular, transparent, and maintainable.
What CELINE helps clarify
CELINE helps clarify the digital design choices behind community-scale energy services. It points to useful building blocks, places where alignment remains difficult, and connections between technical choices, data meaning, organisational responsibilities, and rules for data use.
CELINE helps clarify the digital design choices behind community-scale energy services.
The same issues matter beyond CELINE. Many community energy initiatives need to reuse existing resources, combine data from several domains, build trust into data sharing, and design services that local actors can adopt in practice.
The goal is to make Europe’s digital energy resources easier to connect, reuse, and maintain at community scale.
Readers who would like to explore the detailed review can visit the CELINE Open Repository.
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