Category Archives: Digitalization for Energy

 Todays Need is for Flexibility & Resilience through Energy Ecosystem Alliances.

Posted on by
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Energy-Ecosystems-Key-Design-Lessons.jpg

I believe there is a strong positioning proposal for forming an Intelligent Integrated Energy Ecosystem to confront the growing Grid Crisis.

Let’s Frame the Challenge– Across Europe, as well as the United States of America and multiple countries or regions globally, electricity grids are reaching structural limits

Increasing renewable penetration, growing electrification, distributed energy resources (DER), and the rise of prosumers have created a coordination problem of enormous complexity.

Taking a different approach to this forming a Grid Alliance

Today’s grid challenges are not the result of technology gaps—they result from ecosystem gaps:

  • Fragmented renewable integration approaches
  • Distributed assets without unified aggregation or operational schemas
  • Intermittency unmanaged across boundaries
  • Grid operators unable to access DER flexibility at scale
  • Investors, OEMs, aggregators, policy makers and system operators working in parallel—not together

This is the classic coordination failure that the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) I have been building was made to find a resolution.

The grid is no longer just a “utility problem.” It is a multi-party ecosystem design problem requiring shared infrastructure, neutral governance, and coordinated intelligence.

A Radically New and Different Proposal:

**The Grid Alliance — An IIBE-Designed Energy Ecosystem**

One potential part of a cluster of Energy Flexibility & Resilience Ecosystem Alliance.

Inspired by exemplars such as the AMPShare Battery Alliance, the proposal is to create a neutral, orchestrated, multi-party Grid Alliance where competitors and stakeholders collaborate on shared infrastructure, shared intelligence, and interoperable standards—while continuing to innovate, compete, and differentiate on applications, markets, and services.

This Alliance would become the coordination fabric enabling Europe’s energy transition to operate at speed and scale.

Why the AMPShare Alliance Offers Potentially Breakthrough Templates

The AMPShare Battery Alliance demonstrates a strategic principle central to IIBE thinking: it rose above competition by collaborating on the foundational layer to unlock greater markets, greater speed, and shared system-level benefits.

Studying this through an Ecosystem Lens any Energy Ecosystem alliance can gai key transferable design lessons that “dampen” competition and elevate co-creation:

1. Shift from Product Logic to Platform Logic

As AMPShare made the battery the platform, the Grid Alliance makes grid flexibility, DER orchestration, and shared intelligence the platform.

2. Standardisation Creates Network Effects

Shared grid data models, interoperability standards, and aggregation protocols would unlock exponential value. More participants → more benefit → more adoption → greater resilience.

3. Coopetition at Its Best

Participants collaborate on the grid-level infrastructure while competing on energy services, optimisation algorithms, customer propositions, and market participation models.

4. Lowering Transaction Costs Across the Entire System

Just as AMPShare removed friction for consumers, a Grid Alliance can without doubt remove friction for:

  • DER participation
  • Interoperability
  • Cross-market flexibility trading
  • Grid services procurement
  • Investment flows

5. Governance Enables Scale

A neutral platform, transparent rules, staged innovation cycles, and open membership would create credibility and attract new entrants—including start-ups, innovators, and regions lacking legacy infrastructure advantages.

6. Multi-Sided Value Creation

The Alliance increases value across all stakeholder groups: so fully engagement them

  • Grid operators: visibility, flexibility, stability
  • DER owners: revenue, access to markets
  • OEMs: expanded demand for devices, inverters, storage
  • Retailers/aggregators: new service models
  • Regulators: faster compliance and implementation
  • Communities & consumers: resilience, lower cost, energy security
  • Investors: predictable scale and reduced risk

The Ecosystem Opportunity- Addressing the Crisis head on

Current Drivers Are Creating “Fertile” Ground to Explore

1. Renewable Penetration is Reaching Critical Stability Limits– The system is buckling under variability, inertia loss, and complexity.

2. Battery Costs Have Collapsed -Mass storage and local batteries can be orchestrated into a virtual grid asset—if standards exist.

3. Regulatory Windows Are Opening (e.g., FERC Order 2222 equivalents in Europe) – Policymakers increasingly mandate DER participation and interoperability.

4. Timelines for Grid Reinforcement Are Too Long Twenty-year infrastructure cycles cannot support five-year energy transitions.

5. Value Is Shifting From Assets to Coordination – The future energy system is less about building more assets and more about orchestrating what already exists.

This is exactly the IIBE lens: intelligence + integration + interconnection as the way to “question and form”

The Proposal Suggested:

A Grid Alliance Based on the IIBE Framework

The Alliance would use the IIBE (Integrated Interconnected Business Ecosystem) as its structural architecture:

1. The Outer Purpose & Shared North Star

“To build a resilient, interoperable, intelligently coordinated energy system that supports the renewable transition, reduces risk, and accelerates grid stability through shared ecosystem collaboration.”

2. The Three Zones of the Intelligent Ecosystem to explore as “trigger points”

Zone 1 — Shared Intelligence & Visibility (The Adaptive Engine)

  • Common data models and exchange frameworks
  • Real-time system visualisation across DER, storage, grid flows
  • Shared analytics for forecasting, optimisation, and incident prevention
  • AI-based grid orchestration complements human oversight

Zone 2 — Shared Infrastructure Layer (The IIBE DOS)

  • Interoperability frameworks for DER and battery systems
  • Standardised aggregation protocols
  • Coordinated flexibility markets
  • Technical standards for VPP integration
  • Security, safety and certification frameworks

This is the “battery platform” equivalent: the layer everyone must unite around.

Zone 3 — Differentiated Value Creation

Each party competes and innovates on:

  • Consumer energy services
  • DER optimisation tools
  • AI optimisation models
  • Demand response offerings
  • Community energy platforms
  • Market-facing products

Competition remains vigorous—but anchored to a shared foundation.

Why a Grid Alliance Is Necessary Now

1. The Problem Is Systemic, Not Individual

No single company, utility, regulator, or technology stack can stabilise the grid alone.

2. Ecosystem Dynamics Create a Multiplying Effect

Coordinated action increases adoption and performance far faster than isolated efforts.

3. Alliances Outperform Bilateral Models in Complex Transitions

The EV charging industry, smart home platforms, and battery alliances show that ecosystem-level coordination beats proprietary silos.

4. Without Cooperation, Everyone Loses

The cost of grid failure—blackouts, curtailed renewables, stranded assets, political backlash—far exceeds the cost of collaboration.

Finding the Strategic Benefits for all within the Energy Alliance

For Grid Operators

  • Increased predictability
  • New flexibility resources
  • Avoided grid reinforcement costs

For Consumers & Communities

  • Fair access to participation
  • Lower cost energy
  • More reliable systems

For OEMs & Tech Providers

  • Expanded market adoption
  • Faster ROI
  • Lower integration complexity

For Regulators

  • Practical implementation of policy goals
  • A coordinated partner for system-wide planning

For Investors

  • Lower risk through standardisation
  • Predictable scaling pathways
  • Higher confidence in returns

**The Call to Action:

Rise Above the Competition for Shared System Success

The grid crisis is the classic ecosystem moment: the system is failing not from lack of technology but from lack of coordination, integration, and shared intelligence.

The lesson from AMPShare is clear: Interoperability and shared standards unlock a market far larger than any single player can create alone.

A Grid Alliance—designed with the IIBE as its guiding architecture—offers a credible, neutral, strategic platform for bringing together:

  • Utilities
  • OEMs
  • DER aggregators
  • Storage providers
  • Policymakers
  • Grid operators
  • Investors
  • Research and innovation bodies
  • Communities and prosumer groups
  • Regulators

The aim is to solve together what no one can solve alone.

This is the moment where ecosystems become the operating model of the energy transition. It is the time to think and design in Ecosystems to build out those more connected and integrated solutions needed for the Grid Crisis we are facing today.

Contact me to explore this further

Considering the design of the Energy Ecosystem

Posted on by
Designing the Energy Transition with Ecosystem Thinking and Design

By fostering greater collaboration and co-creation within the Energy Industry, it is becoming crucial to consider Ecosystems in design and thinking. Ecosystems designed well are robust for navigating the complex landscape of any Energy transition.

The Energy transition we are all facing has such high levels of complexity and challenge. We are undertaking a radical redesign of our energy systems where renewables based on clean energy, decarbonization or low carbon, new distributed business models and rapidly growing demands for electricity are all compressed into a thirty-year agenda to achieve net zero. Collaboration, cooperation and coordination will be paramount, and this is where Ecosystems and Platform technology will become essential to manage these “multiple” transformations needed.

Here in this post is a structured argument for promoting Business Ecosystem thinking and design for those involved in the Energy System, emphasizing the benefits of sharing IP, knowledge, research, market insights, and general improvement potentials when it comes to considering Ecosystems within the Energy Transitions, where collaborations are growing in importance and need. I outline ten areas of consideration.

Continue reading →

Thinking about the Energy Transition

Posted on by
Thinking about the Energy Transition

One of the largest News Agencies recently asked me about the Energy Transition. These were some really tough open-ended questions: “What are the industry challenges and solutions,” “the key trends and developments“, What are the Challenges I face,” then “What critical solutions are there to the challenges” and finally “What value and guidance would you offer.”

The energy transition is a vast, complex area to view. I took a deep breath and thought about how I would break this down over a discussion of only 45 minutes. I decided to break it down into bite-size chunks such as Key Challenges, Worries, Big Ticket issues, My working issues, and finally, How the energy industry needs to get organized.

On reflection, I realized how many more points I could have raised or explained. Still, the structure of my breaking this down allows for some further thinking and additions that help me build this out, as many struggles with absorbing this energy transition, and I can build on my initial reactions here. Well, that is in my plans going forward.

Continue reading →

Our Power Grids require Reliability, Resilience and Risk management.

Posted on by
The pressure on our Power Grids needs urgent attention

There is a growing, possibly intense focus and awareness that our Energy Grids worldwide are in serious trouble.

The significant changing consumption needs and generation patterns are causing significant concerns that existing ageing infrastructure is becoming a major source of risk to power grid safety, reliability and financial exposure and in failing to deliver power on the expected 24 x 7, we need.

If you look at ten of the top issues that are causing a growing crisis

  1. Ageing or outdated infrastructure
  2. Supply chain failures are delaying infrastructure equipment changes.
  3. A continued public opposition delaying infrastructure options and bureaucratic barriers
  4. There is a continued lack of sizable funding to make major changes
  5. System redundancies and stranded assets and the issues of legacy write-offs
  6. The increased complexity of the grid is still unclear in its final generation mix design
  7. Cyber Attacks are continuing and exposing significant weakness
  8. Extreme weather events are growing and exposing grid vulnerabilities.
  9. Previously poor project management, inconsistencies in capital spending
  10. Changing demand needs, the acceleration of electrification and the lack of new infrastructure

The need is to find effective responses and considerations of the options, managing change simultaneously while maintaining increasing power demand.

The energy system is being disrupted, and where there are levels of high disruption, there is always uncertainty, debate and learning to take risker views of the future, creating a lot of unease and hesitation. As quoted by one senior person, “we have an inadequate view of what – positively, and in detail – we’re building towards.

As the sector transforms at such an accelerating rate, the move towards ambitious decarbonization targets has required that clean energy is explored in all those options and required to be pushed to the forefront of future solutions. Integrating that variable green energy onto the grid and hardening infrastructure assets against extreme weather are proving some industry’s most pressing challenges.

Continue reading →

Building out the new Energy Ecosystem

Posted on by

Building out the new Energy Ecosystem

I firmly believe the Energy System needs a very systematic and consistent evaluation as we undertake the changes from a fossil-reliant ecosystem into a clean, renewable one, with the overriding obligation to address climate change.

As you consider a change of this magnitude, you recognize how complicated this becomes, and the deeper your thinking becomes, hence why I like thinking through this with the use of mind maps.

I would argue we need a consistent framework to keep working through all the changes that will be undertaken in the next twenty to thirty years to achieve that eventual 2050 net-zero target of decarbonizing the energy system fully;  resulting in a clean, climate-resilient energy transformation.

Within my first post, “Changing the Energy Ecosystem“, I began to lay out the need to change the energy dynamics by redirecting them away from the existing systems and structures.

This is my second post, which continues to build out the new Energy Ecosystem.

This post focuses on the two points of Reforming Business models and the needed Resolutions to take this different thinking forward, then I will take out in the third post, Innovation & Ingenuity, Experimentation & Rapid Pilots,  and Leapfrog Opportunities.

Continue reading →

Pinned to my door, my way of approaching the Energy Transition

Posted on by

Pinned to my door, my way of approaching the Energy Transition

I have on the door of my office the approach I am taking to build out my understanding and pace myself in what I can absorb, translate and offer views upon on the Energy Transition.

My site www.innovating4energy.website is where I outline and see my value contribution in applying the “multiplier effect” to any discovery and validation of the Energy Transition. The value proposition is in accelerating the clients/readers’ understanding of where the potential growth and impact points with the objective of triggering a new business opportunity for it to occur.

What we offer is exploring the Energy Landscape in understanding, so this can then be translated into fresh, exciting Energy Value Positioning Offerings. Continue reading →

We are falling badly behind on our invention in technology for the Energy Transition

Posted on by

 

No energy transition will be achieved without invention and innovation,  yet we are failing badly at present to fund research, development and deployment. We are losing the race to stop our planet warming as our innovative human endeavours are not at the level they should be, or we simply lack the “will” to make the changes we so desperately need to undergo to protect our planet.

My focus continues to get deeper and deeper into the Energy Transition from my innovation perspective, it is highly critical to our future.

I provide different perspectives and thinking, firstly on my innovating4energy.website for my offerings of service and a dedicated posting site for energy, innovating4energy.com  that provides a decent mix of thought leadership, news and awareness, for the Energy Transition.

Do visit these sites if you are curious and want to understand more about the Energy Transition we are all undergoing (really all of us in the World). Also, I can only encourage you to get in touch to see if we have areas of some collaboration opportunities.

So let me get back to what this post is about, providing critical reference points on technologies we need to improve and innovate.

One really rich reference site is the Internation Energy Agency, the IEA who provide some incredible, in-depth knowledge for “Shaping a secure and sustainable energy future for all.”

On their extensive site, they provide constant updates. This site is primarily a place I go back and constantly check when it comes to the progress on the technologies that need to be researched, developed and deployed.

Having the insights and their knowledge helps knowing if we are on track and going to be successful in transforming our Energy Systems. And make the dramatic contribution level for us to achieve the net-zero pathway we need to have in place by 2050.

Continue reading →

How to prepare as an Energy Company for significant disruption – Thomas Kiesslings Enlit Keynote

Posted on by

Thomas Kiessling, the CTO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure, provided in a keynote at the Enlit Europe event, held in Milan between 30th November to 2nd December 2021 his thoughts on how to prepare as an Energy Company for significant disruption  He outlined in twenty-odd minutes keynote his transformation list to enable this with “All of us will go through disruption and opportunity.”

When anyone argues from the start of their keynote: “that no one would dispute that the energy sector is ripe for disruption, we have to go through profound change.” Then further adding, “there is a need to transform the systems radically“, you indeed start paying attention.

Kiessling said the industry “has entered a much greater degree of uncertainty. And uncertainty needs entrepreneurs; it needs trial and error, and it needs system-scale innovation.” Continue reading →

Exploring Siemens relaunch of their next generation of Meter Data Management

Posted on by

Image rights Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic®

I was looking at the changes made by Siemens on their meter data management software on their recent relaunched EnergyIP Mosaic®; their next generation of the leading EnergyIP® Meter Data Management.

“Siemens is taking its market-leading meter data management software to the next level, supporting customers to get ready for future changes to the energy system,” said Sabine Erlinghagen, CEO of Digital Grid at Siemens Smart Infrastructure.

Siemens has taken a design thinking and co-creation approach to understanding customer needs.  Siemens worked extensively with multiple customers globally to understand their exact needs when it comes to meter data management.

The relaunched MDM software focused on enhancing user-centricity

EnergyIP Mosaic® has not only changed its look and feel but opened up new efficient ways of performing tasks, providing better situational awareness for customers.  The solution has focused explicitly on workflow improvements, giving the new software a more efficient, intuitive, insightful, adaptable and ready to use sense and feel.

With the new relaunched software, users can see everything clearly on one screen through EnergyIP Mosaic’s new, modern interface that can swiftly bring together all the information you need on one screen.

This update differs significantly from the past EnergyIP Mosaic® offers a new, modern interface that swiftly brings together all the information on one screen, whereas in the past, there were requirements to open multiple tabs in the UI. Data, correlations, root causes, and other advanced functionalities are intuitive and easily understandable with interactive visualizations and shortcuts.

“EnergyIP Mosaic® lets you find what you need and understand what you see.”

Image rights Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic®

This next-generation solution offers far greater efficiency and flexibility to busy users. The modern interface is easy to learn and use, improving customer experience. Management can quickly review dashboards and data on the go using a tablet to help in any facilitation or deliver a quicker answer for actions and insights.

New capabilities of EnergyIP® MDM

A significantly increased focus on Event Data and Action Management (EDAM)

Do you want to save time by detecting anomalies automatically?
There is so much your data is telling you: the health of your hardware, safety issues, revenue loss, meter installation issues and operational issues. EDAM automatically analyses AMI data, events and interval read with multiple detection rules created by you for your business needs.

Achieving greater Business Monitoring

Do you know what is going on with your operations on a daily basis?

Remove the “black box” and increase the transparency of AMI data to make quick, confident decisions. Users can drill down to investigate data collection and quality issues, see trends and spot geographical clusters of potential service issues points. The users can quickly gain situational awareness and better visibility into data quality issues for effective resolution.

KPI’s significantly improve through this increased transparency. For instance, now it provides KPI potential for what percentage of service points have complete data from a business perspective, improving the data quality. Also built-in is the ability for KPI’s to be constructed for different ratepayer groups, customer classes, AMI systems etc.

The new software gives easier viewing, more informed data to make quicker, confident decisions from data collection and exception management to billing and data exporting, as well as monitoring of usage anomalies; you will have insight into the data and be equipped to act. The real value of providing actionable interactive dashboards for both ongoing and exception resolution handling has become a critical feature.

The availability of Software-as-a-Service is part of this relaunch

Are your critical IT personnel overloaded with maintaining an ever-changing IT landscape? The new EnergyIP Mosaic® offers three different EnergyIP Deployment Models.

So what are the different benefits and trade-offs?

The most traditional MDM model is EnergyIP MDM On-Premise. This MDM model offers the utilities a license model. As the customer, they are responsible for purchasing the licenses, storing the data and additional costs that will occur regarding maintenance updates and/or software upgrades. It is highly customizable and configurable but has its limits and cost considerations to evaluate, depending on the future business plans and the available capital.

The second option is the Hosted one; this is growing in its popularity with the increasing need for data to be stored in the Cloud. Hosted offers the customization and configuration of on-premise, but customers save space and reduce IT costs by storing data in the Cloud. Therefore, the data is NOT stored in a data centre at a customer’s physical location. It is stored in a private cloud environment that only the customer has access to.

The third option is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and is rapidly becoming the future for software and is now available for EnergyIP® MDM SaaS globally. EnergyIP MDM SaaS was launched in early 2021 in the United States. SaaS offers unique benefits because it is a subscription model, and data is stored on a secure but public hosted site. EnergyIP MDM SaaS uses AWS, Amazon Web Services. SaaS is lower cost and has a faster implementation time.

SaaS has all the great benefits of EnergyIP MDM.

Having available all the functionalities, SaaS provides the real option of reducing your risks, cost and complexity in a preconfigured service with Cloud-based security and regular upgrades to allow the MDM provider to focus on their core business and have a very limited IT infrastructure investment and workload pressures. This option is an all-in-one subscription. Implementation can be rapid, possibly within three months, depending on the connectivity and the existing designed communications network and its integration into any more comprehensive technology solutions planned or in use and dependencies on its interoperability and cybersecurity assessments.

Intelligence and building sustainable action capabilities

As Sabine Erlinghagen, CEO of Digital Grid at Siemens Smart Infrastructure, states: “We need intelligence – be it automation or artificial intelligence – to provide improved guidance to grid operators. Digitalization is the key enabler to make grids flexible enough to handle the rising complexity caused by an ever-increasing infeed of renewable energy and a growing share of EVs on the road while remaining resilient.

To master the new complexity, we have to turn data into knowledge and knowledge into sustainable action. With our digital technologies, we want to help utilities safeguard and even accelerate the energy transition.

We need to find better ways to use the already collected data for new purposes. For example, in the past, smart meter data was used for billing purposes only. But data collected by smart meters is extremely valuable for other processes as well.”

EnergyIP can be central to current or future add-on applications.

EnergyIP will be ready to support what customers change or try to accomplish in the future (e.g. changing rates, changing AMI infrastructure, new data privacy and cyber security regulations, exchanging IT landscape, new value add use cases.

EnergyIP Portfolio leads the market in MDM and related applications

Discover the full potential of your data beyond meter-to-cash with add on applications such as Analytics Foundation, Revenue Protection, Integration Adaptors, Low Voltage Outage Management, Advanced Device Management, Energy Engage, Prepay and Front End Processor.

Siemens sums up the result of this relaunch.

“We worked extensively with our User Advisory Board, the largest global user community dedicated exclusively to MDM, to understand their exact operational needs. EnergyIP Mosaic® has not only changed its look and feel but opened up new efficient ways of performing tasks, providing better situational awareness for customers. We’ve improved task efficiency by up to 85%, and situational assessment time has been reduced by 60%. By focusing on workflow improvements, the new software is more efficient, intuitive, insightful, and adaptable,” states Ming Ho, Senior Director of User Experience and Strategic Innovations.

Find out more on the relaunched EnergyIP Mosaic®, the next generation of the leading EnergyIP® Meter Data Management.

Image rights Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic®

So to unlock the full value of your smart metering investment, take a visit and learn more about EnergyIP®’s Metering Solutions on the Siemens site here, where you’ll find all the latest EnergyIP Metering materials, including brochures and datasheets as well as customer support information.

Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic® “lets you find what you need and understand what you see”

 

 

Not seeing the wood for the burning trees at COP26.

Posted on by

We have just finished the most critical COP  meeting in Glasgow. It was the eleventh hour. For two weeks, nearly two hundred countries entered into discussions, finally agreeing on the “Glasgow Climate Pact” to keep the 1.5 degrees C target alive and finalize the outstanding elements of the Paris Agreement.

The President of the proceedings, COP26 President Alok Sharma, commented, “its pulse is weak, and it will only survive if we keep our promises and translate commitments into rapid action.”

“Keep 1.5 alive” has been a rallying cry for diplomats and activists alike at the COP26 negotiations. The phrase refers to the goal of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

1.5 degrees Celsius is seen as the threshold beyond which the effects of climate change become increasingly dangerous to people and ecosystems. But scientists warn that time is running out for humanity to take the transformative steps to achieve the 1.5 goals. And according to multiple estimates, the deal negotiated in Glasgow does not bend the curve enough to get there. Continue reading →