Project Objectives
Project Objectives
Inspiration
Perhaps the key insight behind the OpenElectric view is that common digital energy infrastructure is required to operate grids with 10’s of millions of DERs. This infrastructure will be needed in many (but not all) geographies, and will be likely sponsored by governments or enacted through regulation.
The inspiration behind the reference model itself has come from our involvement in many distributed energy infrastructure trials and pilots around the world since 2015, which have all culminated in dead-end proprietary technology stacks with incoherent architectures and inadequate security design. At the same time, we have been inspired by foundational shifts and inroads of the Cloud Native movement that are leading the world with cutting edge software platforms and products.
The Problem statement
Global electricity transmission system operators and distribution utilities have traditionally deployed custom, on-premis, physically isolated technology platforms, using SCADA over private fibre networks to operate secure critical infrastructure.
By contrast, today’s consumer led DER landscape has millions of components running in insecure physical locations, communicating over public networks, operating in shared Cloud environments, and often in geographies outside the legal jurisdictions of grid operators and their governments.
Current trajectories suggest that distributed and flexible energy resources and IoT devices are likely to comprise up to 40-50% of our fully transitioned renewable electricity grids. They will be as big, and as important to our energy security.
The operation of these asset portfolios need serious design, integration and governance to ensure that they be properly connected, operated and change controlled in a flexible, but fair manner for all energy consumers.
A Call For a common Digital Infrastructure
Implicit in the openElectric strategy is a call to industry and regulators define and use a common digital infrastructure that can aid the integration, lower the cost and improve the standards of small scale energy resources in our electricity grids.
OpenElectric’s Reference Architecture is a practical hands-on implementation guide for new platform rollouts by governments, utilities and new entrants to the energy sector in the direction of high quality, fit-for-purpose, pre-integrated tools and frameworks. These will help them reach the market faster, and build upon solid, resilient, reusable and extensible technical foundations.