Category Archives: Grid Infrastructure

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

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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

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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.

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Simple facts, time to act, on our energy grids

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The energy industry has many problems transitioning from fossil reliance to renewables.

Any energy transition is a massive shift in the energy supply.

As our energy consumption continues rising, we face several global challenges. The primary sources of our energy production will need to change as carbon emissions and warming greenhouse gases continue to amass in the planet’s atmosphere, creating a more unstable world we live in today. Traditionally, we have been heavily dependent on mainly three types of fossil fuels in use for energy generation: coal, oil and natural gas are all non-renewable sources, depleting the planet’s resources.

The continued burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation is giving levels of carbon intensity that need to be dramatically reversed as this continues to put pressure on rising temperatures and a warming planet. We have this real need for an effective energy transition built on electricity supplied by renewables. Renewable energy sources offer cleaner alternatives based on solar, wind power, hydroelectric energy, biomass from plants, hydrogen and fuel cells and geothermal power.

We need to build different energy solutions to resolve the current grid difficulties of accommodating variable power sources like wind and solar energy, the fastest-growing renewable power sources. As these resources begin to supply increasing percentages of power to the grid, integrating them into grid operations will become increasingly difficult.

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