During 2025, O-CEI Horizon consortium focused on one clear goal: making energy flexibility work in real life. Across eight large-scale pilots in different sectors and regions of Europe, partners moved from concepts to in-field activities, testing how Cloud-Edge-IoT technologies can help energy systems adapt to changing demand, renewable generation, and local constraints.
Each pilot contributed practical lessons on how energy flexibility can be enabled at scale, across grids, mobility systems, logistics chains, and communities. The results from this first year show how coordinated digital solutions can turn flexibility from a theoretical concept into a deployable capability across Europe.
Read the story behind each Pilot to get the full picture.
Pilot 1: Orchestrating Energy Flexibility Across Europe
O-CEI Pilot 1 tackled the complexities of integrating distributed renewable resources into traditional grids by building a unified framework for community energy trading and flexibility orchestration across Ireland, France and Croatia; 2025 saw the operationalization of multi-layer intelligence systems, scalable co-simulation testbeds, and on-site deployments of smart energy ecosystems, establishing the foundations for highly automated, reinforcement-learning-enhanced control of flexibility services that will scale in 2026 and beyond.
Pilot 2: Software-Defined Vehicles for Future Urban Mobility
In Romania, Pilot 2 advanced the concept of the Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) as a dynamic hub for computation, connectivity, and energy integration, using O-CEI’s CEI technologies to enable Vehicle-as-a-Service scenarios that drive safety enhancements, sustainability improvements, Vehicle-to-Grid integration, and grid-aware charging strategies, demonstrating how automotive platforms can evolve into active, standards-based infrastructure for smart urban energy and mobility systems.
Pilot 3: Electrifying and Optimising Postal Fleet Operations
Pilot 3 showed how a real postal fleet can become an active part of a flexible energy system. In Austria, the team built and tested an AI-assisted smart charging and energy management system for battery‑electric postal vehicles and depot infrastructure, choosing Neunkirchen as a live test site and connecting dozens of chargers and vehicles to cloud-based control.
The rest of the pilots can be read here: o-cei.eu