For 16 months now, our consortium has been working diligently on the success of the ISLANDER project. Here we give you a brief overview of some exciting progress that has been accomplished.

With the beginning of the project the main focus was to design and optimally size the technologies to be installed, such as the different storage systems, the district heating network and the EV charging stations. In the last months the procurement of base components has been launched, with the idea of starting their installation during Spring 2022. A next step will be the selection of end-users for the different household and building solutions. Therefore, requirements for the selection have been defined and a call for voluntary participation will be run on the island of Borkum. Also, the software architecture and the communication layer of the IT infrastructure has been drafted and the preliminary tests are about to start.

A lot of progress has been made regarding the different forecasting services (energy demand, renewable supply generation, weather, energy price, macroscopic energy supply and demand). Their development is underway and on track for the public report in June 2022. The industrialisation process has started to run the models automatically. To find out about energy characteristics and habits of the inhabitants of Borkum, household and business questionnaires have been created.

The creation of a Renewable Energy Community on Borkum is up and running as well. An action plan for citizen engagement was finished, tackling the main questions concerning the creation of a Renewable Energy Community on Borkum. Next steps will be the work on a technical and economic feasibility study as well as the implementation of the citizen engagement process.

To give you a rough idea on what results can be expected at what time, we created a timeline with milestones of the ISLANDER project and the respective months they are anticipated. As you can see in this timeline, a lot of exciting news is yet to come.