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.

 

openElectric Projects

Below is a list of active projects that are prototyping or implementing aspects of the OE Reference Architecture.

  1. The Reed framework for energy data streaming

    a Cloud native energy data streaming platform for energy systems telemetry and control over public networks

  2. openV2X for electric vehicle services

    Cloud native services for analytics and scheduling tasks for EV smart charging, and vehicle to building / home / grid / anything applications

 

An Open Source approach

We believe that open source is key to security, integrity and trust of our future critical infrastructure. All distribution releases will be released as a collection of interoperable Cloud native microservice reference implementations. Source code will be freely downloadable and used under a free license (MIT).

 

Build a Community

We want build a community, leverage reusable and secure infrastructure to accelerate smart electrification

Lower barriers

Lower the costs and barriers to enable state-of-the-art Cloud native, zero trust software capabilities

Modern practices

Promote modern practices and frameworks (e.g. Cloud native and zero trust) that should be adopted widely across distributed energy, automotive and smart home.

Transparency & Trust

Foundations that increase transparency, continuous trust, and resilience of data prior to use in applications

Addressing the issues for CER/DER products and services

Lifecycle Cost

  • Expensive set up “data plumbing” to utilities and market systems
  • Unclear pathways to revenues on customer bills, via markets
  • Increasing operational and compliance costs, increased risk from privacy breaches

Integration Complexity

  • Too many moving parts – brittle, little tooling, no reuse
  • Clumsy bespoke integrations make a difficult to include optimisation and AI
  • Many different regulations across jurisdictions, requiring pluggable components

Sector Risks

  • Cybersecurity and attacks on critical infrastructure rising sharply
  • Supply chain risks from poor quality, non-reusable software infrastructure
  • Proprietary lifecycles result in software 5+ years behind state-of-the-art

openelectric

Atalanta Release in June 2023

Become a collaborator

Let’s talk

We welcome collaborations with individuals and organisations with new uses for deploying and operating openelectric tools and platforms.