Hello, thank you for coming.
My name is Nicholas, I'm here with Vlad.
We are both working at Saita Energy Flexibility, a Dutch startup, and the main project
that Saita is busy with is the Flexmeasures Project, also at the LF Energy.
But today I will not speak a lot about that.
Actually, I've been here before and I spoke more about Flexmeasures, what we did with it.
And today it's more about open standards, and well, the open source part of it as well,
how can we with open source software actually support open standards and what are they good for?
There's one standard in particular that we are busy with right now.
I'll also have a little bit of time, or we to go into what S2 is, some of you might find that interesting.
Well, on the big scale, why do open standards matter?
We had a couple of talks earlier this morning about open standards in charging.
And it's clear that they actually are relevant for large scale uptake for large scale innovation in these fields that we're working in.
Energy in this case.
Home energy management is the case that I'm talking about now, so not charging.
It's basically part of the home somewhere further below in the stack.
The S2 standard is what we're interested in today, and there's some implementation work.
So first, yeah, open standards are great.
Maybe it's even better than being perfect.
It's being extendedized, so it can actually be used to build other things, and it can be scaled and replicated.
And everybody knows this, I think.
So I will not even spend more time on it, but this is of course a problem.
We all have to live with, and also I will touch upon that because the S2 standard for instance is not without competition.
There's not that different opinions for sure, and even different regulation bodies.
And right now on LinkedIn, somebody posted this a week ago, there's lots of home energy management standards.
And he was even making the point that they're all, maybe for some onlookers, they look the same.
All of these things, don't they all basically do the same thing?
It's information within the house about the energy-consuming things, and why are there so many?
I don't actually share the opinion.
I think the same person actually tried to put them in different groups.
Yeah, we heard a couple about a couple of them here in this field this morning, so they have a place.
And certainly here, these are all very different things actually, and you need a couple of them to make actually a hemp system work.
I'm not sure I totally agree with the distinction being made here that this and then EE bus here are, you know, in their own groups.
All matter for opinions, of course.
If I have to maybe very quickly look into some standards that I have a little bit of an idea of, I would say, open ADR actually is more concerned with the grid side of what the house do to watch the grid should be flexible and help the grid.
So we got the DSOS for instance on that side a lot, but also aggregators.
And then in the house in the building, you have EE bus mostly, maybe then competing with S2, and I see the differences.
And there we are not, you know, at this one standard situation that we all want to have, and we will never be probably.
Then in the end, you have, in the middle of this, you still have, you need something that actually makes the integration that possible and our project effect measures could be one of those.
And we working on that.
And then there's concepts within these, so here you got a virtual top note and open ADR and flex measures could be a virtual end note there.
We haven't done that, but we're working on the S2 side where you have resource managers in the building and then flex measures is the customer energy manager.
To give you a little bit of concepts there, and this is something we are working on and we'll talk about a bit more later on.
Actually, there's more project then that make it that our actual open source project that help you make these integration possible.
There's an LF energy project for open ADR and this will be nice, basically this is a messaging.
Here's a messaging that you need here. That's also a project and we do work heavily on that.
Well, the situation is if you compare it to ebus, which in Germany has a larger community and big companies as champions behind it than S2 is more at the beginning, but I think it has more chances to be more international.
And I will just spend a small time now talking about uptake of energy of open standards in general and in the energy world before then flat goes more into more details of something that we actually busy with and things that we provide and that you could collaborate on.
So this is from a paper, I did some research, so what are the criteria, why organizations at some point decide, yes, I want this standard and I want an open standard or if I have the choice, I would actually choose this over the other.
This is the list of things that came out on top, there's even a big table, it's a nice paper maybe to read.
But I would also boil it down to these three things that are all necessary for something like an open standard to really succeed, not just being a nice standard but actually have big uptake.
Being the one standard that finally does rule them all, but maybe belong to the two of us we standard that actually get implementation.
And that's even some examples, I added this recently because yesterday we there was a talk about post casting 2.0 as an open standard here at first and how Apple actually gave it the push it needed.
Regulation is the topic that is huge in energy and Germany for instance has a very famous article in their energy visits which is like Germans would do you know to detail in too long and we heard about E bas already somebody else this morning said it's clumsy and I heard it's more of a German thing and that might have to do with this this party of the regulation.
But we talked about this part today of course or that's why we here we developers are necessary this where the innovation actually happens and sometimes this is the part that makes the the last decision which standard really takes over.
All enough to have seen this happen when everybody said XML that's of course everything that the internet will do so and so on and then we went a different way right.
Energy when I compare to the internet I find these problems here I will not read them out one by one a lot of you know have dealt with these problems in your daily lives.
I like this for instance I want to highlight this last one that in the house in the buildings.
There's different sectors actually trying to do similar things but then competing for resources like the grid connection.
And if you have electrified heating but also electrified EV charging to very big new actors in the electrified home then.
They compete or we have an actual home energy management system that can bring them together but it makes it a bit more complex and has to unify players who don't know each other and so on and so on.
So I have a lot of not now.
Before I start because we have a few does anyone or like has everyone ever heard of the as to standard just curious.
No okay nice so I have my job cut out so as to standards is the new standard of course it's the only one that we're going to need.
I'm kind of joking it's a bit ironic that now after Nicholas introduction we're introducing a new standard but this is a much simpler standard that is aimed towards the in house flexibility so normally flexibility you are thinking of like the industrial area where it's easy to do and it's valuable.
But to do it at a small scale so the in house level it's quite difficult and requires the communication between not just the the hands but also the OEMs so the people that actually produce the heaters the batteries that we're going to put in our house so the as to standard.
focus is on figuring out okay what what flexibility do devices in house have and it does that by creating a generic flexibility capabilities.
So you have power modulation where you can think of device that can adjust the amount of power it produces like let's say diesel generator buffer energy or so that can be like a boiler that you can then later use to hit to have hot water.
production for some of those are the solar panels where you can not where you can limit the amount that you want so curtail store energy of course batteries positive task this is quite interesting you have the new.
how to go like washing machines or dish washers where you can pause the task you know to wait in case the grid is way to congested.
alternative profile with the same result this again comes back to the washing machines or the dish washers that have certain steps that you need to do in a certain order but they all end up in the same place.
switch the energy source there's different kinds of devices now that can work both on electricity or on gas so you can decide based on let's say price the price of the energy which type you want to use and then the shift in time it's quite simple you just.
postpone something for later so let's say you get your car in house but you only didn't in the morning so then the system might decide that you can charge it may be later in the night.
Now this five generic flexibility capabilities are finally combined in S2 into five control types and this are the five control types that the OEMs will have to define into their own devices.
So basically the let's say we have and I'm going to give some examples later but let's say we have a power station that has to charge battery then that kind of control type is all the field rate based control so it controls how the battery is charging how it's this charging this all kind of information is giving.
is given to the S2 system by the OEM and is the only kind of information that the hands then needs in order to give very let's say performance scheduling.
So let's go into some this is just the big slide where he shows that people and companies are starting to adopt this to and working with it testing it out.
This is one of the project that it's a bit more close source it's designed to prevent grid congestion in neighborhood and they use the S2 to have the communication between devices or like charging stations and then central control of the neighborhood that can accommodate everything.
A more yeah in that project let's say it's the tune project where.
Sita and TN all together we two different companies were done showing a proof of concept for a heat pump and a heat bumper.
A heat buffer sorry for multiple apartments so this is both a open source and a closed source collaborative project.
We have in the open source part we have flex measure which deals with scheduling the home assistant app which is basically the SEM and that communicates to us to with a resource manager.
The resource manager gets the information from the closed source the heat buffer and the heat pump gets the information about those two devices.
Transmitted them to to S2 to the SEM and then the SEM gives this flex measures the information that you can then schedule how to how to schedule the whole device.
Finally is the project I am working on so I joined Sita two months ago and this is the project I've been working on which is call kifflin the idea is to create.
And we have to do that in two ways. First of all we want to open source new algorithm called profile steering which is specifically tailored for S2 devices so it can schedule any kind of the control types that I presented to you before.
You said it's new but actually it's not new but we are open sourcing you know in flex measure.
Quite a while.
They gave it into the text message program.
And then finally it's the realization of the first batch of S2 compliant devices with little.
I'm not that so my pronunciation is amazing.
Finally I want to present to you the open source projects where S2 is involved and where we are involved.
Of course we first have the S2 Python we support all the S2 type of messages and control types.
Very easy to implement and it gives also message checking flex measure which is our core technology that we work on.
I support the same side of S2 so as I said before we're going to introduce a new kind of we're going to introduce profile steering which is a different way of creating scheduling.
We also have yeah.
The flex measure we're going to create a new tutorial for building an open source homes.
Thank you.
And finally we are hoping to support the website of open ADR in the future.
So these projects are on GitHub their open source and you're also free to talk to us and contact us in case you have any kind of idea or you get inspired by S2 and you want to make it a new standard.
I think this is it for now.
Thank you very much for your time and if there are any questions.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I've been seeing you've got a sort of kick-up egg problem with lack of supplies.
And it's this thing.
You know, you're going to build a software without additional really having hardware support.
Are there any sort of generic modules you could get to say like a smart?
If you consider maybe having like a smart socket which will like turn on and off a device or something you can use to basically rent your effects and existing pieces of hardware like.
I want you to be seeing also something.
I've heard about it.
I just know that that E to the other office one of the actual OMS, but you're right.
The question was actually to repeat that.
The the chicken egg problem also consists of getting the hardware support so that the device manufacturers actually support their part of S2.
And then second part of the question was is there maybe some support in in getting some sockets for existing devices to make it retrofit for this as two standard.
So I know the first part is true and we have luckily in this last project in the project an actual heat pump manufacturer who's committing to make their ecosystem actually of devices compatible for the second part actually it's a good idea.
But I haven't I don't know any.
I don't think there's any projects right now, but as S2 is designed I don't see anyway why a user could not define for example the kind of flexibility.
Let's say you will plug a washing machine into a socket as you said and then you define it yourself okay this is the kind of control it has what kind of profiles it has.
And then you pass down to the hems and the hems can decide what and how to do it and what to do it.
I think that's it.
All right.
I'll we'll be around this topic is interesting.
Thank you.