Speaking at the Powered On Live: The Grid 2025 virtual event back in June this year, I talked about the rapid growth in Europe’s energy demand, due to increased electrification – growth in electric vehicles (EVs) for example – and also data centre use, which is predicted to account for about 5% of total European power consumption by the end of the decade.
My keynote session addressed the challenges and opportunities in building a more resilient energy system, and I raised the question of where and how we can make an impact. There’s little doubt that we need smarter infrastructure, and we are starting to get there.
Standards are important of course. But I also stressed the importance of customer-owned equipment and resources remaining under customer control. Balancing regulation with customer engagement is challenging, but flexibility for the customer should also offer value. Standards should be pliable enough to enable this.
As an industry ecosystem, the OpenADR Alliance is collaborating with policymakers and governments around the world, including the UK’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), on energy-smart appliance standards.
Ongoing development of the OpenADR standard will play a key role, for heat pumps, water heaters, EV chargers and other energy-smart appliances. The Energy Networks Association (ENA) has also started work on a flex market mechanism to standardise interactions between DSOs and energy aggregators, including large consumers and significant solar installations.
We’re also seeing real examples in The Netherlands, which has faced grid congestion issues, even going as far as halting building projects due to power shortages. To address this, they are building virtual power plants like the Johan Cruijff Arena, which uses a large-scale energy storage system from repurposed EV batteries powered by renewable energy sources to store energy and use it for events, reducing its reliance on the grid.
In Sweden, E.ON subsidiary, SWITCH, offers flexibility to customers through its platform, which includes a marketplace for trading, a decision support tool and a flexibility service provider tool. It also monitors and notifies customers with non-firm connection agreements when they need to reduce their load.
If we look back to the energy crisis 20+ years ago when California suffered rolling blackouts, these led to emergency measures by the California Energy Commission (CEC) who established a standardised way of communicating with customer equipment. These principles remain relevant today. The customer owns the equipment, and direct control is limited unless necessary, using informational and motivational messages.
The CEC collaborated with utilities to develop OpenADR, the foundation of today’s standards. Simultaneously, the ZigBee Alliance created the Smart Energy Profile, which evolved into IEEE 2030.5, a standard for direct communication between energy devices.
Initially enthusiastic about the Smart Energy Profile protocol and Zigbee devices, utilities anticipated controlling all appliances in a house. However, they realised this might not be practical. As local control systems and OpenADR progressed, it was clear that customers could be kept at a distance while still managing their systems.
Demand response programs demonstrate this. Southern California Edison’s Charge Ready program requires public chargers and charging networks to receive grid management messages that regulate capacity and power consumption over OpenADR. SCE simplified the program by providing developers with an interface to connect to their server and control power consumption, focusing on network load rather than individual EV chargers. This program now runs with several similar programs.
Programs like these offer insights for potential initiatives in other markets.
Policies and standards are crucial for interoperability and asset protection but must be agile enough to avoid long-term asset loss. Customer integration is vital for transparent communication and future grid stability.
Rolf Bienert presented the opening keynote at this year’s Powered On Live: The Grid 2025, talking about how standards can make the grid more resilient. He also discusses the issues in more detail in his piece for the latest issue of Electrical Review magazine.