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Electrical grid and appliances: schemes to make them work together

Published Date 12/18/25 8:00 AM

Note: this post is an update of the post Interoperability of smart appliances in the EU

Smart appliances and interoperability

 

Electricity from renewables, accounting for a growing portion of the grid, is not constant and may not always match demand; consequently, so-called smart strategies to keep electrical appliances/equipment functioning are being developed and will likely be implemented in the near future.

A smart appliance is an appliance that controls its energy consumption through demand-side flexibility1:

  • It is able to automatically respond to external stimuli, e.g. tariff information, direct control signals, and/or local measurement (mainly voltage and frequency).
  • Its response is a change in the appliance’s electricity consumption pattern (demand response). These changes to the consumption pattern are referred to as the “flexibility” of a smart appliance.


Excerpt from Figure 8 of “Unlocking flexibility: No-regret actions to remove barriers to demand response 2025 Monitoring Report“, ACER, 9 April 2025

Communication between the electrical grid and the connected appliances, as well as between the appliances themselves if they need to be aggregated to augment overall flexibility, is called interoperability: “Interoperability is understood as the communication and data exchange link between the individual appliance and the supply side … via a home energy manager or internet/cloud systems and in some cases also the AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure), making it possible to achieve a better balancing of energy generation and energy consumption within the grid and/or to avoid grid congestion.”2 The device’s capability to measure the power grid’s parameters (i.e., voltage and frequency) can also be added to this definition.

Interoperability schemes in the EU

 

As of now, there are three main interoperability schemes in Europe3:

  • The Code of Conduct for Energy Smart Appliances (CoC ESA):
    • Code of Conduct v.1.0, available since 23 April 2023, is a voluntary scheme that defines the structure of the exchanged data4 and the characteristics of the communication protocol5, without advocating for any protocol in particular. Ver. 1.0 covers white goods (washing machines, tumble driers, washer-driers, dishwashers), and HVAC appliances (including water heating). Adhering manufacturers are prominent manufacturers of white goods and HVAC products for the domestic and small-commercial markets.
    • CoC v. 2.0, currently under development, was launched on 18 September 2024 to add new devices: energy management systems (EMS), photovoltaic inverters (PVI), and electrical vehicle chargers (EVC).
  • ACER Recommendation 01-2025 on reasoned proposal for the establishment of the network code on demand response:
    • Annex 4a proposes amendments to Regulation (EU) 2016/1388 on the DC Network Code on Demand Connection (NCDC). The Regulation defines “a network code which lays down the requirements for grid connection of … heat pumps ...”, among other devices (art. 1).
    • If the proposal passes, heat pumps, newly added to the NCDC, will need to self-measure the grid frequency and reduce, according to a defined pattern, their electricity consumption if the frequency decreases below a certain threshold.
  • UK Smart Secure Electricity Systems (SSES) Programme:
    • The Smart Secure Electricity Systems (SSES) Programme creates the technical and regulatory frameworks to help consumers access cheaper electricity.
    • If approved by the UK Parliament, from 2027, domestic scale heat pumps will be required to have demand-side flexibility capabilities6 in order to be placed on the market. Such capabilities shall be present in heat pumps, but it will be up to the user to activate them.
    • In addition, if Parliament approves, from 2030, domestic scale heat pumps will be required to react to time-of-use tariff signals from the grid and/or to be directly controlled by the grid, de facto conceding full flexibility, for which the heat pump owner will be remunerated. Again, such capabilities shall be present in heat pumps, but it will be up to the user to activate them.

Consequences on products and equipment

 

It seems clear then that although these three schemes are aimed at the same target, i.e. demand-side flexibility, they are not equivalent to each other: the CoC ESA involves interoperability hardware and software upgrades for heat pumps; the ACER Recommendation requires hardware and software upgrades to self-modulate heat pump electricity consumption based on the grid’s frequency, and not for interoperability; finally, the UK SSES sets a framework for demand-side capabilities, but different from those defined in the CoC ESA.

In all cases, upgrades of heat pumps are required, with the possibility that such upgrades might not be feasible either because the changes entail disproportionate costs or because some heat pumps may be too obsolete to make them possible, with the consequence of requiring investments in innovation by manufacturers. On top of this, the diversity of the schemes is also an implicit cost if they need to be differentiated per market.

Hopefully, there will be some degree of convergence to avoid differentiation of products based on their geographic destination, which would go against the concept of market harmonisation, and require too many concurrent product upgrades.

Stay tuned for the next steps!

 

References:

1. Based on sect. 7.1 “Definitions” of “Preparatory study on Smart Appliances (Lot 33) - TASK 7 REPORT – POLICY AND SCENARIO ANALYSIS”.
2. Excerpt from sect. 3.1 of “Energy Smart Appliances’ Interoperability: Analysis on Data Exchange from State-of-the-art Use Cases” by Papaioannou Ioulia, Andreadou Nikoleta, Tarramera Gisbert Angel; EUR (where available), Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2022.
3. There are a couple of other schemes valid at a national level but they are not covered in this post.
4. Fully compliant with the SAREF framework of ontologies according to technical specification ETSI TS 103 264 (SAREF core) and ETSI TS 103 410 series (SAREF extensions).
5. Open Application Programming Interface/Open Communication Protocol as per, for instance, EN 50631:2023.
6. As defined by “PAS 1878:2021Energy smart appliances –System functionality and architecture – Specification”.

 

Related Posts

 

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Interoperability of smart appliances in the EU

 

By Raul Simonetti
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