The electrification objective
The transition to 100% renewables, electrification of transport and migration off gas appliances be highly dependent on a cohesive, low cost digital backbone that can control, monitor and secure its operation.
This is what we term the digital infrastructure for electrification. It is our view that this infrastructure should be designed, built and supported for the public good.
The OpenElectric initiative is a comprehensive electrification reference model, and a series of tools and packages that can be used by energy service providers worldwide to achieve this objective.
Digital infrastructure
Interoperable Services + IoT Clouds
Traditional ways for managing electric systems is in need of a rethink on how we communicate and secure the movement of energy information. Cloud managed services together with the rapid growth of internet connected distributed energy resources and IoT drives new requirements to move beyond perimeter based security, to embrace new zero trust paradigms and published APIs with common data formats.
Service Continuity
The systems we deploy to share data and functionality for electrical systems – solar panels, hot water systems and electric vehicles – will will be deployed daily to launch new features and important updates. The underlying foundations that build in redunadancy, resilience and future upgrade pathways will be the bedrock of a robust yet evolving electric ecosystem in the long term.
Cyber resilience
As the digital grids become larger, more interconnected and interactive, they also become much more complex, which in turn makes them much more vulnerable to failures. Shared frameworks for collective defence will minimise the impacts of cyber threats and unintended mishaps through resilience at every level in our systems.
Reference Architecture
OpenElectric is defining a reference architecture and releasing open source software for the electrification services community. This includes tools for the data collection and processing of consumer energy resource and energy market telemetry to support energy delivery services. It facilitates data from energy IoT sources that includes metering and telemetry from residential and commercial sites, gate metering, rooftop solar, battery storage, electric vehicles, load flexibility, smart thermostats and many more.
This section contains the documentation of the openElectric strategic technical vision, which sets out a feasible approach for utilities and service providers to deliver low cost energy and e-mobility services in the context of globally connected supply chains and high penetration renewables.
Read here for more detail on the openElectric Reference Architecture.