Defining the architecture of the future electric grid — through open standards, policy advocacy, and working software.
The electric grid is undergoing a fundamental transformation. As homes electrify — adding EV chargers, heat pump HVAC, heat pump water heaters, battery storage, and rooftop solar — the grid must coordinate with millions of distributed loads and energy resources in real time.
Grid Coordination is an initiative to define, advocate for, and build the open architecture that makes this possible.
We articulate how the future grid should communicate with customers and their energy management systems — through price signals and power limits, not per-device proprietary control.
We engage with regulators (including the California Energy Commission) to promote open standards, customer choice, and interoperability in flexible demand appliance standards.
We lead by example. Our founder fully electrified his home — replacing gas appliances, adding solar, battery storage, and smart panels — and demonstrated a working OpenADR 3 dynamic pricing system at the CEC Demand Flexibility Summit. See the project.
We contribute to standards bodies and working groups — including the OpenADR Alliance and AHRI 1380 — to ensure that protocols evolve to support the grid coordination architecture we envision.
We don't just use open standards — we help create them. We proposed and led the working group that added push notification protocols to OpenADR 3.1, developed the Electrification Bus (eBus) framework for home energy infrastructure integration, and publish open-source libraries that make these standards practical.
Today’s grid coordination model is fragmented: each appliance connects to its manufacturer’s cloud, each aggregator controls a single device type, and no one has a holistic view of the customer’s energy situation. This per-device model cannot scale to the electrified home.
The alternative is simple in principle:
This is what Grid Coordination is about. Read more in our Vision.
We are strong proponents of OpenADR 3, the open standard for communicating demand response signals, dynamic pricing, and grid events from utilities to customers. OpenADR 3 provides the protocol layer that connects utility price servers to customer energy management systems — a critical piece of the grid coordination architecture.
Our open-source software libraries implement OpenADR 3 in both Clojure and Python.