The Lugaggia Innovation Community (LIC) pilot site is located in the municipality of Capriasca, near Lugano in southern Switzerland. Established in 2019 through a collaboration between Azienda Elettrica di Massagno (AEM), the municipality of Capriasca, and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), the LIC serves as a real-world testing ground for innovative residential energy solutions. AEM acts not only as the energy provider but also as the community manager and Distribution System Operator (DSO), enabling a fully integrated energy management framework that complies with Swiss energy regulations. LIC is designed according to the self-consumption model (Raggruppamento ai fini del consumo proprio, RCP), which requires a single point of common coupling between the entire energy community and the local distribution grid.
LIC – Lugaggia Innovation Community pilot site at Capriasca, Switzerland.
The community comprises 18 single-family homes and a kindergarten, housing approximately 75 residents and consuming about 270 MWh of electricity annually. Energy generation is supported by nine PV systems totalling 95 kW, while storage is managed through a 70 kWh district battery and two smaller residential batteries that operate independently. Space heating and domestic hot water are mainly generated using electric assets such as heat pumps and electric boilers. The community runs entirely on the low-voltage network level and is supplied through a 630 kVA transformer. Data management at LIC is highly advanced, featuring smart meters, submeters, and environmental sensors. Real-time data is collected through MQTT protocols and securely stored on AEM’s research servers, in compliance with Swiss data protection laws.
The INTELLIGENT project’s activities will focus on optimizing the use of local flexibility available at the pilot site, engaging more flexible assets from the community, and investigating potential services and business models for LIC to provide services to the local distribution grid.
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