AlpEnergy is a European regional cooperative project that brings together energy producers, development agencies, research institutes and local administrations in five different countries in the Alpine area - France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland - to deal with the central question of supply and storage of renewable energies. Although hydroelectric, solar and wind energy, and wood and other biomass energies are widely available throughout the Alps, there are inequalities in accessing these sources.

The need to balance an increase in production and to make use of renewable energies also requires a stronger and more extensive electricity grid, which is capable of handling high levels of energy production at a distance. The Virtual Power Systems (VPS) in the AlpEnergy project are an effective solution to this problem. They use ICT technology, combining intelligent handling of load, storage and energy demand, and which integrate the electricity grids with communication networks to combine loading and production of energy in the various different geographic and demographic areas involved. This is an important information system that gathers and collects production and consumption trends in real time and which, using specially-designed software, identifies load points for intervention for balancing purposes and to notify the user community for self-adjustment of consumption.

More information about the project is available on the website: www.alpenergy.net