This document describes all requirements, quality goals for the architecture, as well as the key functionalities meeting the main expectations of relvant stakeholders for project EDDIE.

Background Information

Today, more and more energy data-based services emerge within and beyond the energy sector, enabled by European legislation. In the energy sector, Directive (EU) 2019/944 of the Clean Energy for all Europeans Package recently established the rights to access energy-related metering, production and consumption data for customers and eligible parties of their choice. Services of this kind empower customers, can consult energy buyers based on their consumption patterns or contribute to efficient energy management, amongst others. However, the main barrier today is that there is no large-scale, uniform and easy access to energy data across European Member States, which is a severe handicap for new services (e.g., web-based or mobile applications) to emerge, raise the energy awareness of citizens and foster economic growth on a European level. Currently, players also act on national data-sharing infrastructure and practices, which limits their interoperability and growth perspective. These constraints of national data-sharing infrastructure have an industrial, economic and social dimension on a European level and beyond. Our envisioned project European Distributed Data Infrastructure for Energy (EDDIE) lowers data integration costs drastically to tackle the existing economic problem of the non-existent or limited energy data interoperability.

On an industrial, but also economic level, it is hard to find out, how to get access to different kinds of energy-related data in other Member States (e.g., consumption patterns, production). Even if the know-how is available, it is still a considerable effort to develop and maintain connectivity with regional data-sharing infrastructures. Reports show that 50% to 80% of the costs of data projects go into data integration. These high costs for data integration imply that new actors in the energy system cannot focus on their already complex core tasks – e.g., to provide customers with energy efficiency services or to provide services to the grid. On a social level, the awareness of European citizens about their energy consumption is – if the data is available at all – mostly limited to national surroundings which hinders the deployment of cross-border energy services especially in close to the border regions.

In addition to industrial, economic and social problems, EDDIE tackles another technical problem and closes a significant gap for the further development of data-based solutions in the energy domain: the lack of streamlined, secure and easy access to measurements of in-house sensors (e.g., Internet of Things devices in households). The Administrative Interface for In-house Data Access (AIIDA) will provide the customer with the infrastructure to share these data streams in near real-time with remote services on a manageable, GDPR-compliant consent basis. Together, the EDDIE Framework and AIIDA will enable interoperable, truly European solutions based on data available in online energy data hubs and “in-house data”. These two main components form the nucleus for a Common European Energy Data Space.