A carbon-neutral future is more easily achieved through partnerships. On 17th September, Luče became the first Slovenian self-sufficient energy community to enable island operations last year. The village in the Savinja Valley is completely energy self-sufficient in certain periods of time and its operation in practice was presented by project partners.
Petrol, together with its partners Elektro Celje and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the University of Ljubljana, presented island operations and individual technologies that drive the energy self-sufficiency community in Luče at the “open day”. At the end of the event, Petrol handed over e-cars to members of the energy community for testing, as part of the X-FLEX project.
Luče, one of the four pilot sites of X-FLEX, is a remote alpine village with 400 inhabitants in Slovenia. It has a low local network capacity with weak middle voltage overhead line connection from near-by town Ljubno. This results in two major problems first limited local RES production and the second frequent power outages usually due to weather events. Inhabitants of Luče are very engaged in energy-related topics and are included in the first local energy community (developing in Compile project) in Slovenia with various distributed flexible units. The DSO in Luče is ELCE, which is middle sized EU DSO.
XFLEX project will provide in Luče flexibility to the energy grid from DER (Distributed Energy Resources) such as community battery, home batteries, PV and EV-charging units, to enable further RES (Renewable Energy Systems) penetration in the LV network that will improve the network operating costs and operational reliability inside the area operated by the DSO. As well as new ways to provide ancillary services to the DSO/TSO with fair remuneration to all actors involved.
Additionally, Luče is a pilot of the project COMPILE and during the event, some actions were presented.
Photo credits: PETROL