OptimCE is an open-source platform for managing energy communities. This page describes what it does today, in its alpha version, without announcing anything that has not shipped yet. The user guide then walks through every screen.

Members, meters and communities

Member management: onboarding new members, roles, links between users and communities.
Supply points and meters: members, their supply points, their installations and their meters are held in one place. The list of participants, kept once, then feeds the administrative documents and billing.
Several communities, one instance: a single OptimCE installation runs several energy communities.

Allocation keys: configure, generate, simulate

The allocation key decides, quarter-hour by quarter-hour, who receives which share of local generation. OptimCE covers its whole life cycle.

Configuration and amendments: every version of the key is recorded and members’ acceptance is tracked.
Automatic generation: from a CSV file of quarter-hourly consumption and generation, the module proposes a candidate key with the expected collective self-consumption rate. Two algorithms are available: an exhaustive search over your region’s standard keys, and LOGAAS, which comes out of CeCoTePe’s research in the Locomotrice project. The proposal never goes to the grid operator on its own: it follows the usual amendment workflow.
Simulation: test a key of your choice on your own data and read self-consumption, surplus, self-sufficiency rate and sharing rate, overall, per time step and per iteration, without touching the key in force.

Further reading: generate an optimal allocation key and simulate a key on your data.

Billing of shared energy

The first version of the billing module is built for the Walloon framework.

You set your prices in €/kWh: a selling price for shared energy and a buyback price for injection, for the whole community, per customer segment or per supply point, with a validity period.
A billing cycle produces a draft per member from the imported allocation data. Once issued, each document receives a number in a continuous sequence and a structured payment reference.
Three documents are generated as PDF: the invoice, the credit note and the producers’ remuneration statement.
Payment tracking is built in, partial payments included, and each member finds their invoices in the application.

The details are in the billing module announcement.

Administrative documents and deadlines

For Walloon communities, OptimCE prepares the CWaPE documents from the official, unmodified files: eleven sets of fillable PDFs, Excel workbooks and Word agreements, pre-filled with the community’s data. Fields the platform cannot derive remain editable.

Every file and every document goes through statuses recorded in a log: a correction is added, it erases nothing.
Deadlines are calculated in working days on the Belgian calendar and surfaced on the manager’s dashboard.
Emails, in French, Dutch, German and English, report invitations, invoices and administrative deadlines.
Each member can see what has been declared about them to the regulator.

OptimCE files nothing and signs nothing on your behalf: filing remains your responsibility. See CWaPE documents and deadlines.

Engaging the community

A news board keeps members informed; polls consult them. Three result-visibility modes are available: anonymous, transparent, or results revealed at closing. An advanced mode sets separately what the manager and the members see. See engaging energy community members.

A manager can publish their sharing operation in a public registry built into the application. Anyone can browse it to find an operation open to new members.

An open platform

Open source: all the code is published under the Apache 2.0 licence.
Self-hosting: you can install OptimCE on your own infrastructure, free of charge and without restriction. The steps are described in the installation guide.
OptimCE Cloud: the hosted version is free throughout the alpha phase. A paid offer may come later; alpha users will be told well in advance, and self-hosting will remain free.
Integrations: an event-driven architecture (NATS) lets you plug in third-party tools such as an energy management system, and a REST API lets you integrate OptimCE into your own tools.
Multilingual: the interface is available in French, English, Dutch and German.

What the platform does not do

OptimCE works on the allocation data sent by the grid operator and on the files you import: it does not display real-time data. It does not file your documents with the CWaPE and does not sign your agreements. Its billing covers, for now, the Walloon framework only.

Run or create a community with OptimCE

The application is free during the alpha. Create your community, invite your members and set up your allocation key; the user guide takes you through it screen by screen.

Open the application Read the user guide View the code on GitHub