The project region consists of the federal states of Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland.
Almost one quarter of the final energy of the project region is produced out of renewable
energy resources. Approximately 57 percent of the total electric power consumption is
generated from local renewable energy sources. Vienna and the urban areas of Lower
Austria are characterized by their high energy consumption and may temporarily use the
surplus of energy generated in other areas of the project region. The rural areas of Lower
Austria and Burgenland have the highest potential for the further development of renewable
energy sources.
All of the three federal states have developed initiatives such as energy and climate
strategies or smart city strategies in order to support the transformation of the energy system
towards a decarbonized system. The implementation of these strategies requires a further
expansion of renewable energy production and solutions addressing capacity overloads of
local, regional and supra-regional power-grids, as well as storage systems and demand side
integration in order to cope with the highly volatile production of wind and solar energy.
The exploratory study ¿EnergyLab East¿ provides the first opportunity to form a close
collaboration of the representatives of the three federal energy agencies, the three federal
energy providers and the administrative bodies of the state governments. The project will
develop trans-regional consumption scenarios ¿ considering high population growth rates in
urban regions as well as the electrification of the mobility and heating sector ¿ and it will
investigate the system interactions of various energy technologies. Topics such as grid
expansion, storage systems, consumption management etc. are supposed to be adressed
and discussed by the project members.
Another aim of the project is to identify an adequate number of possible flagship projects that
are located in the project region and are suitable to be implemented in a ¿project cluster¿.
The objective of ¿EnergyLab East¿ is to describe the implementation concepts of the follow
up projects comprehensively with regards to their management structures, their funding, user
participation and their value added. Within nine months, the project selects and prepares
several innovative flagship-projects in the fields of innovative green power plants and storage
systems, Power-to-Gas, Power-to-Heat, eMobility, Demand Side Integration etc. that can be
implemented during the time period from 2018 until 2022. Thereby, the project contributes to
the international demonstration of Austrian energy technologies.