A grid signal has to travel a long way to reach the appliance that acts on it: from the utility, across the Internet, into the house, and then between the devices inside it. No single standard covers that whole path, and none should.
Three open standards cover it between them, and Grid Coordination backs all three.
The grid to the customer, over the Internet.
OpenADR 3 carries dynamic prices, demand response events, grid alerts and power limits from a utility to whatever the customer chooses to receive them: an appliance directly, a hub they own, or a service provider they picked. The server address is a setting the customer controls, so no aggregator sits in the path unless the customer wants one there.
It is the only one of these standards designed for the utility-to-customer leg, and it runs on ordinary web technology (HTTPS, JSON, OAuth2, MQTT for push) on hardware costing a few dollars.
Grid Coordination is an active participant in the OpenADR Alliance. We proposed and led the working group that added the push notification protocol adopted in OpenADR 3.1, publish open-source libraries in Clojure and Python, and operate a free public price server carrying real California prices.
Appliances and IoT devices in the home.
Matter is the open smart home standard from the Connectivity Standards Alliance, shipping today in ordinary consumer products and supported by every major ecosystem. Its energy management clusters (Device Energy Management, Energy EVSE, Water Heater Management, Electrical Power and Energy Measurement) let a home energy manager see what devices are doing and shift what they plan to do.
Matter covers the appliances and IoT devices a household buys: thermostats, water heaters, EV charging equipment, lighting, sensors. It runs over the home network and does not reach the utility, which is exactly right. Paired with OpenADR 3 it completes the path, with prices and limits arriving from the grid over the Internet and reaching every device over Wi-Fi, Ethernet or Thread.
Home energy infrastructure devices.
The Electrification Bus, eBus for short, is an open framework for home energy infrastructure: the devices that make up the home’s electrical system rather than the devices plugged into it. The panel, the meter, inverters, batteries and the microgrid interconnect device. These are not consumer products, they are rarely bought by the homeowner as smart devices at all, and they have a coordination problem Matter was never designed to solve. Today each one meters what it can and shares nothing, control paths run through vendor clouds that fail during the outages when local coordination matters most, and every device-to-device integration is a bespoke project.
The Electrification Bus defines how these devices discover each other, publish what they measure, and coordinate locally without the cloud in the loop.
Grid Coordination developed the Electrification Bus. The specification and reference work are public.
| Standard | Covers | Transport |
|---|---|---|
| OpenADR 3 | Utility to the customer’s own equipment | The Internet |
| Matter | Appliances and IoT devices in the home | The home network |
| Electrification Bus | Home energy infrastructure devices | The home network |
Matter and the Electrification Bus both run on the home network, but they cover different classes of device: Matter the appliances and IoT devices in the home, the Electrification Bus the electrical infrastructure of the home itself. Each of the three is open, each is implementable on inexpensive hardware, and none of them requires an aggregator or a manufacturer’s cloud.
Several other standards address parts of this problem. Some are complementary, some fall short in ways worth understanding before they are written into regulation.
Read the assessment — S2, AHRI 1380, CTA-2045 (EcoPort), IEEE 2030.5 and OCPP.