COPPER

The City of Ghent is lead partner in the Interreg North Sea-funded initiative COPPER - Cities for Open and Participative Planning for Electricity grid Resilience.

To prepare Europe’s local authorities to coordinate local energy systems, the City of Ghent has joined a European-wide alliance of frontrunner municipalities, businesses, research organisations and representatives of Distribution System Operators to test Europe’s first wave of Local Energy Action Plans. 

Funded by the Interreg North Sea programme, the COPPER initiative is the first Europe-wide collaboration to demonstrate Local Energy Action Plans, a bundle of techniques and activities that will enable local authorities to drive locally-powered cities. The project runs from 2023 to 2027.

The ambitions of the project

Pilots

Deliver six first-of-a-kind pilots for local authority-led energy planning, from logistic parks to electric vehicle fleets to entire neighborhoods. 

Research

Explore ways how Distribution System Operators and local authorities can work together to build a local energy system of storage and flexibility technologies, policies, market incentives and collaborations to help locally-powered cities thrive. 

Tools

Build data models and other tools to boost local authority’s capacity to understand and steer their local energy system 

The city of Ghent’s role

As well as leading the COPPER initiative, the City of Ghent will pilot grid resilience incentives for an ‘all-electric’ neighbourhood. Mariakerke aims to be one of the first districts to go climate neutral. Ghent will work with Distribution System Operators Fluvius and its project partner University of Ghent to test a system for rewarding providers of flexibility services like dynamic energy storage.

Partners and there goals

• The City of Bremen will partner with shared mobility provider Cambio Bremen to pilot new electric vehicle infrastructure for 20 electric vehicles in car-sharing stations, aiming to monitor, assess and build a local energy action plan to manage the effects of electric vehicle mobility on the city’s grid.
• The City of Antwerp will pilot solutions to reduce the peak demand of electric vehicles and electric heating, using energy management software and bi-directional charging to smooth daily demand from electric vehicles while updating its Strategic Energy Vision for heating.
• The City of Dordrecht will support one of the first climate-neutral business parks in Europe, DistriPark, with a pilot for energy planning and flexibility support.
• The Municipality of Fredericia will test the creation of a virtual energy community to support its growing need for flexibility as it invests in green hydrogen storage and the electrification of its local industry. Fredericia will be supported by the University of Aalborg, who will help Fredericia model how electrification and power-to-X solutions will impact the grid.
• Varberg Energi, the municipal-owned Distribution System Operator for the Swedish town of Varberg, will build a city-wide virtual power plant within COPPER. The Nätflex network will provide flexibility services to the town of 35,000 people.
• Climate Alliance brings its membership of 2,000 cities to ensure the key lessons from COPPER pilots are exchanged all across Europe, aiming to kick-start a wave of local energy action planning across Europe.
• E.DSO brings its position as a  European representative for Distribution System Operators to bring the key perspective of Europe’s Distribution System Operators to the initiative and find collaboration models between DSOs and municipalities.
• Cleantech International will bring its global innovation community of climate technology businesses to support a series of matchmaking workshops between solution providers and European cities.
• Center Denmark will act as the project’s provider for data collection, data science and data processing, using their experience collecting and operationalising data from 400,000 Danish households to provide data-driven solutions for the green transition