A federated Artificial Intelligence testing and experimentation facility for the European energy sector

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the energy sector offers new opportunities for developing flexible, efficient, and sustainable infrastructures. Nevertheless, real-world deployment is still constrained by the lack of large-scale, integrated environments that can evaluate advanced algorithms under realistic operating conditions while ensuring regulatory compliance. This paper presents EnerTEF (which stands for Energy Testing and Experimentation Facility), a federated platform for testing and experimentation in the energy sector designed to address this gap. We introduce a unified TEF architecture that enables full-stack evaluation of intelligent systems, including predictive modeling, optimization, learning under data distribution shifts and federated learning across geographically distributed sites. The framework integrates high-fidelity digital twins, a privacy-preserving data exchange framework and regulatory sandboxing to support transparent, explainable and robust AI development. EnerTEF demonstrates how such a framework can be deployed in critical energy domains through three real-world scenarios including short-term hydropower generation forecasting, coordination between distribution network operators and distributed energy resources and real-time optimization of self-consumption for municipal buildings. Results show that EnerTEF effectively enables the development of novel AI models, improves cross-context generalizability and supports innovation for complex energy infrastructures, ultimately creating a practical, scalable path for addressing different energy-related problems and heterogeneous data.