First version of the European energy data space is up for funding

Funding to deploy the first version of the European energy data space is now available under the European Commission’s Digital Europe programme for 2023-2024.

The European Commission is making available €74 million (US$80 million) in funding towards the creation of the energy and other sectoral data spaces as part of an over €176 million ($191 million) package for the Digital Europe 2023-2024 work programme.

The sectoral data spaces, a key component of the EU’s data strategy, are intended to form repositories for pooling, accessing, sharing and processing data from within the respective sectors from across the EU.

Based on common data infrastructures and governance frameworks, their evolution is being driven by users within their respective sectors.

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Over time the goal is for them to be gradually interconnected, furthering the data sharing and, for example, energy with mobility opening the energy sector to wider participation, and ultimately forming a single market for data that can assure Europe’s global competitiveness and data sovereignty.

Energy data space

With various initiatives well under way towards the energy data space, proposals for the 2023-2024 programme should foresee the deployment of the first version in at least ten member states with piloting of at least five use cases in areas such as distributed energy resources management, provision of flexibility services for electricity grids or smart and bi-directional electric vehicle (EV) charging.

These should use a commonly agreed reference architecture with replicable and scalable building blocks, e.g. on data models and formats, data exchange APIs, data provenance and traceability, metadata, etc.

In particular regarding data interoperability arrangements, the data space should be based on agreed minimal interoperability mechanisms that will align energy-relevant key stakeholders on a set of minimal sufficient capabilities needed to achieve interoperability of data, systems and services between the key players of the energy value chains at all levels, i.e. European, national and local.

Another requirement is the consideration of a complete set of open standards, while other deliverables required are the definition of suitable business models that can ensure financial sustainability of the energy data space beyond the end of the project and the implementation of a governance system for overseeing its operations.

An amount of €8 million ($8.7 million) is allocated for this energy data space advancement, which is expected to take place over 36 months.

In addition to the support for the data spaces, the €176 million package includes funding to advance research and use of artificial intelligence, for projects on the cloud to edge infrastructure and for skills development.