Daniel Clauss
Head of Energy
Steven Steer
Principal Data Consultant
The energy grid is becoming increasingly decentralised, and data standardisation has never mattered more. Rooftop solar, batteries, EV chargers, heat pumps, and smart meters are now active participants in the system, and every one of them generates data. Every flexibility service depends on effective data exchange. Every optimisation algorithm requires machine-readable information about assets, markets, and grid conditions.
Yet the digital systems behind the grid are growing more complex, not less. Many organisations still struggle to understand which software components are embedded in the platforms they deploy – a gap significant enough to prompt regulations such as the EU's Cyber Resilience Act. If data cannot be structured, shared, and interpreted consistently across systems and borders, the potential of system transformation stalls.
Getting this right could unlock three critical accelerators for the European energy system transformation:
- Interoperable data exchange that enables decentralised flexibility to scale across assets, operators, and borders.
- Common standards that reduce duplication and fragmentation, lowering costs and accelerating digital innovation.
- Stronger cybersecurity when data architectures follow consistent, well-governed models.
The stakes are high. Without these foundations, flexibility cannot scale efficiently, cross-border optimisation becomes harder, and AI systems spend more time translating incompatible data than improving grid performance.
Below, we look at where Europe's fragmentation problem sits today, why an orchestrator is needed, and what energy companies should do in the meantime.
Europe’s fragmentation problem
Europe has long pursued the vision of a single energy market. Yet at the digital layer, the system still behaves like many separate ones.
Across countries, regulators and system operators define their own data standards, interface definitions, and compliance frameworks. Time-series resolutions differ, market interfaces are implemented differently, and data models and semantics vary. For energy companies operating across Europe, such as Octopus Energy, this means accommodating different national approaches to data access, interoperability, and flexibility exchange rather than working within a uniform framework.
The result is duplication, inefficiency, and slower innovation. Flexibility services that could scale across borders remain confined within national frameworks, while digital systems spend significant effort translating incompatible data formats rather than optimising grid performance.
Industry bodies are increasingly naming the governance gap behind this fragmentation. Eurelectric note that current governance arrangements separate cybersecurity and physical security tracks, with inconsistent standards across Member States. It calls for a holistic EU-level framework to integrate resilience into system planning and provide clear guidance for both large utilities and smaller operators.
Without stronger coordination, national initiatives risk solving parts of the problem while reinforcing fragmentation at the European level.
The missing puzzle piece: an orchestrator
National initiatives to improve data exchange and digital resilience already exist across Europe, but they are not synchronised. Standards are evolving in parallel, governance remains fragmented, and too much still depends on national approaches.
Europe needs more than guidance. It needs an orchestrator and, in some areas, stronger EU-level support for the adoption of common technical standards and interfaces across national energy systems. If interoperability is left to individual Member States alone, fragmentation will persist.
A European orchestrator could help align ontologies, define semantic interoperability, and create clearer governance for how data is shared across actors, markets, and borders. This matters because flexibility depends not only on automated data exchange, but on standardising the governance decisions that determine when and how data can be exchanged in the first place.
Recent developments in the UK reinforce this direction of travel. In March 2026, the UK government published its Energy Digitalisation Framework, formally committing to a coordinated and orchestrated approach to the digital energy system. Our team at Zühlke laid the groundwork for this orchestration policy back in 2021 as part of the UK government’s Energy Digitalisation Taskforce.
Eurelectric has called for a similar kind of joined-up thinking in the EU, urging Member States to establish cross-functional bodies that unify NIS2 and CER compliance, approve joint resilience roadmaps, and eliminate the silos between cybersecurity and physical security planning.
In practice, we have seen what this kind of orchestration role can look like. Working with National Grid ESO, we helped define the role of a Digitalisation Orchestrator as part of the UK's net-zero digital transformation, an approach that offers a useful model for European-level coordination.
Building for data standardisation: what energy companies should do now
Waiting for European-level alignment is not a strategy. The regulatory environment will continue to evolve, but the data architectures that utilities, DSOs, and suppliers build today will either enable or constrain their ability to participate in tomorrow’s flexibility markets.
At the TSO level, Europe has grid codes that provide a common framework. At the DSO level, no equivalent exists yet and this is where the data interoperability gap is most acute. Equipment manufacturers of heat pumps, EV chargers, inverters and batteries face this gap directly: without common DSO-level data standards, the integration of distributed assets remains manual, costly, and slow.
The practical steps are:
- Adopt externally recognised information models, such as the Common Information Model (CIM), rather than building from internal definitions alone.
- Design data platforms with interoperability beyond your own organisation from day one.
- Prioritise data portability, so that switching between platforms or providers does not mean starting from scratch.
- Engage in the standardisation process itself, because the organisations that shape standards will find compliance far easier than those who inherit them. At Zühlke, we actively participate in developing energy data standards, including work aligned with the GB Common Information Model, which is intended for broader European adoption.
Data is where energy resilience is won
If decentralisation is the structural shift of the energy transition, interoperability is its enabling condition. That requires more than national initiatives, it calls for a European-level orchestrator that aligns data governance, integrates cyber and physical resilience, and synchronises how standards evolve across Member States.
Utilities cannot wait for perfect alignment. They must build architectures that bridge what algorithms need, what assets generate, and what regulation permits – with secure cloud infrastructure, structured data foundations, and clear internal governance.
This is where energy resilience becomes operational. The focus must shift from piloting to building because only through effective data sharing and real-time interoperability can seamless operations be achieved.
We support both sides of this transformation, helping shape governance and orchestration concepts at ecosystem level, and enabling utilities to implement interoperable, secure, AI-ready architectures in practice. Because in a decentralised energy system, resilience is no longer just engineered in hardware, it is engineered in data.
