Landscape report on energy and flexibility data models and interoperability across the sectors of energy, mobility and buildings

The success in achieving the target of the Green Deal will require harnessing energy from low-carbon sources, massively scale up investment in renewables, to power our homes, businesses, and vehicles. To achieve this, millions of installations — including solar panels, battery storage, heat pumps, boilers and electric vehicles will need to be seamlessly integrated onto current electricity networks.

In response to the Digitalising the energy system: EU Action Plan that called for the development of a Common Energy data space, Europe needs to establish a smarter and interoperable European Energy System. This landscape analysis authored by Digital4Grids presents a landscape analysis on Energy and Flexibility data models and interoperability across the energy value chain, analysing existing reference architectures, data structures and interoperability standards.

In light of the Ukraine crisis, a rapid transition away from expensive oil and gas, whose price is set in volatile international markets, will both help hold bills down and meet the Commission 2030 climate change targets. The current European energy crisis is significantly accelerating the energy system decentralization towards Distributed Energy Resources – with average growth rates exceeding 30% in several member states.

The electricity system is undergoing rapid transformation on the pathway to reach the Re-power targets, with the expected high penetration of renewables, electrification of buildings and transportation, and deployment of behind-the-meter and distributed energy resources (DERs).  Many stakeholders are concerned about potential adverse impacts of these trends and agree that going forward it is essential to leverage demand response flexibility management as a critical resource to meet the Europe’s ambitious GHG emissions reduction targets by 2030.

This document gives a snapshot on possible blocking issues of data exchange in the three interconnected key sectors: energy, buildings and mobility; and evolutions of associated regulatory frameworks. In this respect, the report provides an analysis of interoperability and emerging standards, which are instrumental to move data across different vertical silos,  and identify most relevant data structures and ontologies to be used to harmonize data exchanges as well as associated communication standards through various domains of the energy sector.

Standard solutions are instrumental to enable data exchange across today’s information silos to boost grid flexibility and integration of renewables.

Related Links

Digitalisation of the energy system

Related documents

• Communication: Digitalising the energy system - EU action plan
• Staff Working Document
• Media package: EU action plan on digitalising the energy system 
  • Press release, Questions and Answers, Factsheet