Welcome to the second part of the interview with Tomaz Dostal, member of the Task Force “Next Generation Smart Metering” within the ESMIG working group and Head of the Strategic Engineering Management Team at Iskraemeco. With his years of experience across various companies and various types of products he has developed, Tomaz shared thoughts and his prediction for the future of Smart Energy Management in Households. If you haven’t read the first part of the interview with Tomaz Dostal, read it here.

Are there any established legislation and regulation in the Smart Energy Management field? 

European legislation, specifically directives aimed at optimizing energy consumption, supports the 2055 energy agenda. These directives require EU member states to develop and submit national plans, which are crucial from a legislative standpoint for achieving set energy goals.

To be honest, I haven’t seen significant progress in simplifying flexibility, neither in Slovenia nor in Germany. When I’m talking with DSOs, they all say that there’s a lack of proper laws, legislations and framework to support these changes.

No one is quite sure how this new flexibility should function, including understanding the roles of various stakeholders like the DSO, the supplier, and the homeowner. This might also explain why I wasn’t able to provide a clear answer about whether a DSO can agree with a supplier to dynamically change prices. The framework isn’t clear – DSOs are responsible for maintaining the hardware, but not managing the market. Here in Slovenia, and perhaps throughout Europe, there’s a separation where DSOs are responsible just for delivering energy, while retailers are in charge of selling it. So now it’s not clear who can operate the flexibility, who can call for it.

There’s also a conflict of interest. DSO might prefer to reduce consumption in certain areas or at specific points, while retailers want the opposite – to increase overall consumption. So, this isn’t easy to deal with, it isn’t clear. A lot of work is needed to develop a complete and functional framework. This is a complex, system-wide issue which needs a lot of work to make it properly.

Also, DSOs or suppliers are not allowed to limit consumption of homeowners and the issue is indeed too complex to be resolved quickly. For example, the European Union had set a goal for an 80 to 85 percent penetration rate of smart metering by 2020. And it didn’t happen, we’ve only reached just over 60 percent. Installing a meter is a relatively simple thing to do since it involves local operations specific to one distribution company and doesn’t impact the system as a whole.

And now we are talking about coordinating the activities of multiple parties—retailers, distributors, homeowners, and the legislative framework. It is a much more demanding initiative, and yet we probably don’t even have some entities who will be responsible for flexibility. So you can understand how complex the issue is, and until recently, it wasn’t considered a major problem, which meant there was not much desire to solve it. Significant changes will happen when a strong governmental intervention demands action. We need time and perhaps real-time experiments to find viable solutions. Indeed, pilot projects are crucial as we’ll likely need many of them to explore different approaches and identify the most effective solution. 

There are numerous Horizon Europe calls focusing on this issue, which gives hope for progress. We are involved in one of these initiatives, which is why I’m aware of these efforts. Some distributors are actively exploring solutions, and there have been trials in Germany and the Netherlands. It’s clear that finding a solution will take time and require extensive standardization.

Are there any standards and are you satisfied with the standards in Smart Energy Management? How do you see the further development of standards in this area?

To be honest, there is currently no unified standard, and that’s probably the biggest problem right now. Europe has recently introduced the Code of Conduct which define EEBus, smart energy appliances protocol within the house, as a protocol to support Smart Energy Appliances communication, which is expected to launch by the end of April. Now it remains to see will EEBus actually establish itself as a technical standard for smart home devices and if it will be widely adopted.

The lack of a common standard is evident, as we see with Modbus, which has become a de facto standard but is not formally standardized. This leads to complications, as each device manufacturer may implement it slightly differently, and that diversity makes it challenging to develop a universal HEMS that can seamlessly communicate with various devices. Each type of device, especially from different manufacturers, may require a different communication protocol, complicating the integration process.

When discussing DLMS, it’s likely the best standard for in front of the meter standardization. It is well-standardized, extendable, and structured. So, if you ask whether there are effective standards, I can affirm that DLMS shows promise. However, DLMS hasn’t yet standardized all objects or parameters needed for efficient energy management, though there are working groups focused on that. In terms of standardization in front of the meter, things look pretty good. Behind the meter, however, the situation is more divergent and less developed. 

eV charging station for example use OCPP for connection to the backend system. However, while OCPP is a good and complex protocol, when it comes to dynamic load management in the house, it is not used, and manufacturers often use different solutions (they typically install an additional meter in the house to get instantaneous consumption readings).

We tried to find a solution on how to manage the maximum demand in the house when a car is charging.

Since we are a smart metering company, we decided to use smart meter for the job. We have a smart meter that holds all the necessary data—it knows the maximum allowed power, measures instantaneous power and current, among other things. To get access to this data, we used DLMS, the natural language of the meter, as a data protocol. We also used a P1 interface (a consumer data interface), since most meters already have it, as a physical interface. P1 is configurable, so we were able to select which data to output. The protocol is also secure and effective, so it satisfies all the criteria.

We then converted this data to our internal protocol for distribution within the house. By this, we essentially created a kind of micro HEMS, reading data from the meter and informing charging stations what to do. Initially, we used a proprietary wireless protocol because the system we share is very simple, and we call it distributed dynamic load management. We communicate to the charging stations if the situation was within or beyond the power limits. The stations adjust the power based on this—one simple bit of information. Initially, this system used the proprietary protocol, but now we’ve shifted to Modbus, and we’re considering implementing it on EEBus for better in-house communication. 

We chose to do that since charging station manufacturers are not really familiar with DLMS. Since DLMS is quite a complex protocol and not a very simple one, not everyone can handle it. That’s why we translated it to something more commonly used within the house.

Also, there’s one more dimension I didn’t mention. We are currently discussing all communication being done within the house. This involves a home area network that keeps your IoT devices’ information from leaving the premises.  It can also be a different solution where data goes from the house to the cloud, and then there is cloud-to-cloud communication. This energy management would be done in the cloud. That is also one possible solution, which still probably doesn’t have standard interfaces or some protocol for how to exchange data.

Personally, I’m not so young anymore, so I prefer the edge solution where everything is managed within the home. The younger generation, who are more familiar with IoT, tend to promote the cloud-to-cloud solution, which involves sending data to the cloud and managing it there. This second solution requires good connectivity. I really prefer managing things internally, because even if your internet connection fails, you still maintain your system’s capabilities and robustness. That’s my preferred approach, but it’s hard to say which one will ultimately prevail.

What organizations should collaborate to further develop standardization, legislation and regulation in Smart Energy Management? Which organizations does your organization cooperate with regarding this?

In my view, ESMIG should potentially be an organization that helps define the functional specifications or operations of the system. It’s a suitable organization for promoting, marketing, or advocating in this field on the level of the European Union.

ESMIG should collaborate with other organizations like Euroelectric and EDSO because managing grid flexibility and energy is a system-level solution. It’s not an isolated solution like DLMS was before, so it needs wider cooperation and a lot of stakeholders should be involved in this.

Then you have technical standardization organizations like the DLMS. DLMS is, of course, one of the organizations that I believe will continue to support developments in this field. Another important organization is CENELEC – it operates through various technical committees to advance these standards. I’m personally involved with TC13, but I know that TC69 is also actively working on these issues. These organizations are tasked with the job of standardization, which is vital if Europe intends to remain at the forefront of this industry.

What is the future of Smart Energy Management since some distribution companies implemented pilot projects that were not so successful?

All these pilots were around 5 to 10 years ago. Apparently, someone had predicted that there would eventually be a problem. But at that time, there wasn’t a problem at all. The grid wasn’t overloaded, photovoltaics weren’t common, and EV chargers weren’t widespread. Trying to push consumers to adopt flexibility when they saw no benefit from it was challenging. In Slovenia, for example, there was a limitation that a consumer could only benefit up to 10 euros per year for being flexible. These limitations caused the pilots to fail. There were also no flexible devices on the market—it was simply too early.

Now, things are different. We know the grid has problems, there are many smart devices on the market, and it’s developing. New pilots will likely show benefits. We are currently discussing with a couple of DSOs and companies to do the pilots again, just to see and to prove that it makes sense. We need more proof of concept to promote our solution. 

Another part of our promotion is to encourage not just investment into OT but into IT as well, because investing in IT can help reduce overall expenses and possibly delay other investments or spread them over time, so they don’t have to be made immediately.

In the past, the pilots were too early, similar to how the first video phone in the 1970s failed. Now, we use video conference technology—it’s a different technology but the same concept. Same here, they were too early, nobody was interested. We also made a home display connected to the smart meter showing current consumption, but people only used it for a few days and then just put it in a drawer because it brought no benefit to them. Now, the situation has changed.

What is the most important lesson you learnt throughout your career?

I’ve been thinking about what’s the main message for the younger generation. I guess it’s that there’s no free lunch.

Joke on the side, I’ve been involved in innovation practically all my life, in various roles and different companies. And now, I’ve been innovating here at Iskraemeco for 15 years.

Whatever you do, you need to fight for it heavily. It’s not as simple as sending an email and expecting things to happen. You need to fight for every step. Even something that looks very simple, is never that simple. It’s hard work.

Conclusions:

Through the 2055 energy agenda, the European Union passed directives that should optimize energy consumption, but the member states have not yet made much progress in reaching those goals, because no one is still sure what the exact roles of the various stakeholders (DSO, supplier, homeowner) are in terms of flexibility.

Currently there is no unified protocol in the field of Smart Energy Management and organizations such as ESMIG, EDSO and Eurelectric should cooperate and work on marketing, promotion and lobbying for standardization, and technical standardization organizations such as DLMS and CENELEC should work on protocol standardization.

Question for the audience:

Should the European Union, through its member states, provide incentives to interested parties in order to more quickly engage in the implementation of energy management and standardization of the Home Energy Management System?