Energy data spaces in Europe – ontologies, standards, hybrid cloud
Energy data exchange needs rethinking to advance flexibility in Europe, a new report by the Digital4Grids consultancy states.
The report, which was prepared for the European Commission, points to the potential of the new digital platforms leveraging IoT, edge computing as well as hybrid cloud architectures to better orchestrate residential distributed energy resources at the lowest voltage levels up to flexibility service provider portfolio optimisation as well as grid flexibility management.
For these real-time data exchanges, interoperability and open Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs) have become critical technology building blocks to enable plug and play data interfaces from the distributed energy resources located in prosumer houses to energy markets federated through flexibility service providers, market operators as well as TSOs and DSOs.
In particular there is a need for improved data exchange across three key sectors, energy, buildings and mobility.
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The report reviews the current status of energy data models and ontologies, noting that no unified approach has so far been deployed to harmonise data models and knowledge across all the domains of the energy value chain. Instead, several ontological schemes have been constructed, deriving from interoperability standards and relevant business ecosystems representing key actors of these domains.
Similarly, smart energy data exchange standards to access distributed energy resource flexibility data behind the meter are reviewed, noting that as energy systems are constantly evolving, the associated standards, databases and repositories are dynamically evolving as well with a ‘life cycle’ that encompasses creation development, and maintenance.
Thus relevant standards, once matured and prototyped through research initiatives, should be promoted beyond these projects through relevant stakeholder communities or sometimes mandated by certain regulatory developments.
The report concludes with a set of three main recommendations with accompanying sets of ‘actions’ to facilitate the deployment of energy data spaces across Europe and support the wider digitalisation of the sector.
These are to:
- Leverage existing matured ontologies and open data models across different domains of the energy sector.
- Support the development of key business ecosystems to foster the adoption and deployment of selected standards.
- Favour the development of new hybrid public cloud-on premise-edge architectures leveraging real-time data streaming exchanges.
Among the actions recommended is to leverage the Harmonised Role Model and SmartGrid Architecture Model as initiated through the BRIDGE initiative as foundational tools to develop energy data spaces.
Further, the IEC Common Information Model (CIM, IEC 62325 and IEC 61970), IEC 61850 Part 7 and the Smart Appliance Reference Model (SAREF4ENER) ontologies should be leveraged as a starting point for future energy data space developments.
Ecosystem support should be focussed on the development of EEBus and Zigbee/SEP2/Matter in the smart home domain, OpenADR/IEC 62746 for the flexibility service provider domain, OCPP/IEC 63382 for the electromobility domain and IEC 61850 Part 7/IEEE 2030-5 for smart inverters.
The development of an open source community also should be facilitated to foster reuse of open source technology building blocks aligned with standardised APIs, data connectors and digital twin models.
To facilitate platform deployments, a target reference technical architecture for the energy sector should be developed and should be complemented with the relevant tools for data sovereignty and trust.
