The Living Lab at Green Energy Center: Status 2025

The Living Lab at the Green Energy Center did not begin as a planned research infrastructure. It emerged because during the implementation of the regional energy transition, practical problems appeared that could not be handled within existing organisational or technical structures:
Instead of separating research and operation, systems were operated while still being understood. Each new domain was therefore not added as a topic, but as a response to a coordination gap that became visible only during real transformation.

When hydrogen became a system problem

During the early implementation of the regional energy strategy, electricity-based planning encountered a practical limitation: processes requiring molecular energy carriers could not be integrated into operational planning.
No actor within a regional operating system was responsible for hydrogen logistics. HyWest was created in response to this, not to demonstrate hydrogen technology, but to observe how molecular processes interact with electrical infrastructures in daily operations. The relevant situations are documented in operating records, such as in the 2016 statement from the founnder of the Green Energy Center Europe: https://youtu.be/RHxzCZd3c70?list=PLvm1wAxuTkzyIEVi6j-rjiymOahEq8AH5

When electrified mobility changed grid behaviour

With the transition to electric mobility and the Urban Charge & Park environment, a different coordination problem appeared: electricity demand no longer followed predictable consumption patterns but behavioural patterns. EWest was introduced to observe how availability, timing and user decisions reshape energy demand while the system is running, not in simulation but in public operation.

When decisions became the bottleneck

Once electrical and molecular infrastructures interacted simultaneously, a new limitation appeared: decisions could not be taken fast enough to stabilise operation. This did not concern calculation accuracy but decision timing.
REINFORCE and FLEXI therefore addressed information processing, exploring whether computational methods can participate directly in operational coordination rather than post-analysis. Operational contexts are documented here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvm1wAxuTkzwbvygvXj8QbqOdO1onWXEB

A research structure that follows system pressure

The Living Lab therefore grew not through thematic expansion, but through the gradual discovery of coordination gaps: energy sources → behaviour → decision-making time. Each addition corresponds to a level that is necessary to keep the system functional during the transformation.