ENERES Co., Ltd.

ENERES Co., Ltd. announces its participation in the “ReCIDA (Renewing Community Infrastructure in Depopulated Areas) Consortium” established by The Japan Research Institute, Limited, Kyoto University, and Kyoto University Original Co., Ltd., which aims to realize sustainable transportation and logistics services in depopulated areas.
ENERES will support the consortium’s activities to build new transportation business models in depopulated areas leveraging decarbonization investments, from the perspective of a power company and aggregator.

[About the ReCIDA Consortium]
With the proportion of people aged 65 and over exceeding 30% in most areas across Japan, securing transportation for the elderly and maintaining logistics services have become challenges.
The ReCIDA Consortium was established to address these challenges by building community infrastructure that creates new flows of transportation, logistics, and electricity, maximizing the natural resources of depopulated areas. Specifically, the consortium will work with local governments and private companies nationwide to consider and aim for social implementation from the following perspectives:

Considering transportation business models that reduce financial burden by utilizing decarbonization investments
Coordinating transportation, logistics, and power infrastructure
Developing outcome indicators and evaluation methods for maximizing regional value
The first collaboration with a local government will involve considering and building a transportation business model in Saji Town, Tottori City.

This area, selected as an “Decarbonization Leading Area” by the Ministry of the Environment in April 2023, has prefectural hydroelectric power plants and many promising hydroelectric power sites, and the project will consider a transportation business model that balances promotion of local production and consumption of renewable energy utilizing these resources with maintenance and securing of transportation businesses. We will also promote the development of a system to utilize EV batteries as emergency power sources.

After this consideration of the transportation business model, we plan to proceed with phased implementation including demonstrations. The transportation business model considered in this area is planned to be expanded to other areas with similar challenges, such as areas with abundant forests and precipitation.

[ENERES’s Role and Future Plans]
ENERES, along with its subsidiary retail electricity provider ENERES Power Marketing, is both an energy provider that offers services such as renewable energy supply, offsite PPAs, and wheeling support, and an aggregator that bundles energy resources located across society.
We focus particularly on aggregating low-voltage resources, accumulating know-how in real business deployments that use EVs as power sources for society as a whole such as bidding in the capacity market (adjustment power source I´ bidding until fiscal 2023) for trading electricity to maintain supply-demand balance during tight supply conditions due to extreme heat or cold, by aggregating EVs with other power sources.

We will participate in the ReCIDA Consortium as a retail electricity provider and aggregator, sharing knowledge and providing information. In the Saji Town, Tottori City initiative, as an aggregation coordinator, we will consider business models that create virtuous cycles in the local economy, such as controlling storage resources including stationary storage batteries and EV batteries in the area and supplying surplus power to the market.
The ReCIDA Consortium’s initiatives can also be described as efforts that advance regional decarbonization while solving challenges faced by local communities through industry-government-academia collaboration and fusion of energy and mobility domains. We believe these initiatives, which lead to both realizing a decarbonized society and regional revitalization, align with ENERES’s vision of “creating new relationships between people and energy to realize a prosperous future society.”

Through participation in this initiative, ENERES will improve its technical capabilities and knowledge in utilizing the spare capacity of storage resources, while advancing considerations toward providing actual services to local governments facing similar challenges.

Through participation in this consortium, ENERES will contribute to the realization of a decarbonized society and creating a society where local people can live safely and securely by effectively utilizing local resources.

[Reference Information]
▶ Press release from the ReCIDA Consortium
Aiming for social implementation of sustainable transportation business models in depopulated areas
Regarding the establishment of the “ReCIDA Consortium”