The Energy Transition Has a Philosophy Problem, Not an Acceptance Problem.
Software Defined Everything (SDx) means building the foundation before you know all the features. We have the hardware. It's time to start.
What does a systems engineer do when they get solar panels with battery storage, a heat pump, a wallbox, and dynamic pricing?
They are trying to understand how they talk to each other. The question is: how?
Additionally, I found out that I need a smart meter that broadcasts in real time how much I feed into the grid or consume from the grid. As it turns out, I do have a simple inverter that cannot broadcast those values. So I have to get another device until the government provides a true smart meter.
Imagine sitting there, ready to set everything up, then learning that the grid information is missing—the very information the whole operation is based on.
In the meantime, I learn how all devices should work together. As it turns out, while all devices have an API and are able to provide basic communication, no device is built to be the manager.
Luckily for me, it is summer, so the days are longer than the nights. I can get most of the power I need while the sun is shining, my heat pump does not have to work as much, my EV can be charged during the day using only solar power, and my battery is only being tapped overnight.
How would that work at night then? My EV needs a little more power, the heat pump has to do a little work, and the solar panels do not generate enough power during the day, so my battery has to do some heavy lifting.
Here is where dynamic pricing comes into the picture: charge the battery only when prices are low. The battery can know that and do that, but power still has to be distributed equally among the devices, so the question arises: who is managing that distribution?
The Energy Transition is only going to work when a dedicated layer of communication is available. Installing hardware without coordination is like building a road network without traffic management. Cars can move - but nobody decides who has priority, where congestion should be avoided, or how the flow should be regulated
This is where a Home Energy Manager (HEM) comes into place and tells the devices how they can operate. It tells which device can operate when. If nobody is home, the heat pump can wait a cycle in order to avoid tapping into the grid while other devices are running.
In theory, this sounds reasonable and like a piece of hardware that future-proofs our homes. In practice, tech companies want to build ecosystems with very high walls, and managers think sharing operational data is a bad thing.
What nobody is telling you is that companies building those HEMs need not only software, but also need to know how those devices operate in order to connect them and make them usable.
Some companies are providing you with an all-in-one solution—one ecosystem. At the same time, companies make it harder for HEMs to fully connect to them.
If all that sounds familiar, that is more or less how we got AUTOSAR: a unified software architecture that allows devices from different manufacturers to talk and exchange information in a car.
A step 0 before we got to Software Defined Vehicles (SDVs). It is important to mention that SDV relies on AUTOSAR. The main difference is that AUTOSAR is a standard for devices, while SDV is a philosophy of how to build a car.
The philosophy is that a car’s features are not defined by its hardware but rather by its software.
Like our smartphones, the camera sensor and the lens are not the main parts that determine picture quality. It is the software that computes that information.
That being said, smartphone manufacturers are now building cars. Not because they know anything about cars, but because they know how software can be used to build cars, including the user experience.
If we compare the evolution of the car to our own personal power grid, we can see that there is no AUTOSAR equivalent. However, smart home standards such as Matter or Modbus are trying to be a substitute for AUTOSAR.
All this is just the first wave. If we want to optimize our own personal grid so that devices get power when they need it and save power when they are not needed, the second wave will be the Software Defined Energy Transition.
That philosophy - that layer of intelligence - is a true turning point for the energy transition.
While we can control individual smart home appliances, in the age of AI we do not want to control devices. We want to go to work, come home, or even go on vacation.
The smart home should not only control devices, but power management should also be able to shut down power usage when it is not needed and regulate power depending on how long it is not needed.
We are in the middle of the transition between the first wave of getting devices into our homes and the very start of wave two, where the Software Defined Energy Transition begins.
We have seen the drama of SDV and can draw parallels to see where this is going.
We are in the early stages where customer feedback around the functionality of devices can shape the future. At the same time, engineers have established software workflows that focus more on customer value than ever before.
Furthermore, the feedback does not have to go directly to manufacturers, but can also go via standards and lawmakers.
We are at the same moment the car industry was before AUTOSAR.
What we decide today determines whether the Energy Transition gets its Software Defined moment or remains a collection of dust collectors that happen to be scattered around the house.