Digitization Era for Electric Utilities: A Novel Business Model Through an Inter-Disciplinary S/W Platform and Open Research Challenges

The digitization era for electric utilities is tightly coupled with the development of interdisciplinary software (S/W) platforms aiming at establishing much more efficient communication pathways with their clientele and other smart grid market stakeholders. This paper presents the SOCIALENERGY S/W platform, which is funded by the EU H2020 work programme SOCIALENERGY is a user engagement, social networking, gamification, and business management platform aiming at evolving energy markets' operation and educating virtual energy communities. The proposed business model is targeted on electric utilities' customer segment. The proposed system is modular by design incorporating several subsystems from various disciplines, such as ICT, energy efficiency, behavioral economics, education, and gamification. The proposed system facilitates the easy, rich, and deep communication among individual energy consumers, virtual energy communities, utilities, and other less direct stakeholders (such as electric appliance retailers and building renovators). Finally, the paper provides important research/innovation insights and challenges to be addressed towards the proposed Green Social Response Network concept and the exploitation of SOCIALENERGY system as part of more complex systems for the 2030 smart grid era and beyond.