The transition to distributed intermittent sustainable energy sources (such as solar and wind) necessitates flexibility in electricity demand. Consumers will play an active role by pro-actively managing their electricity demand (for washing, cooling, heating, lighting, etc.) according to their needs and available energy resources – the so-called Demand Side Flexibility (DSF). Energy Management applications will control automatically the consumption, generation and storage. There are barriers to the seamless flow of DSF data through the smart grids-home IT infrastructure, covered by three different industries with separately developed technology and not-necessarily-aligned standards, i.e. the Utility, Telecom and Home appliances industries.
This study investigated the need for alignment among these standards. Nine standards have been selected and compared with SAREF (Smart Appliances REFerence ontology), developed in an earlier DG-Connect study, and its Energy extension, SAREF4ENER. It was concluded that such alignment is needed and that it could be achieved through SAREF/SAREF4ENER. Several actions and recommendations for various stakeholders, such as the Standards Development Organisations, have been identified and listed in the report. DSF interoperability through the complete, end-to-end Smart Grid-home IT infrastructure was demonstrated. The next step is to update the concerned standards and to scale up the results to more use cases in more smart devices at real consumer sites.
Read the Final Report - full version