FROM THE INDUSTRY
Fast forward a few years. How is all this going to work in our homes? I want an AI agent running on my smart hub in my home, so if it loses connectivity, it’s still smart enough to know what it needs to do for the next hour or day until that connectivity comes back. That AI agent is orchestrating everything in my home, knows what’s on my calendar, it knows I’ve got to drive 50 miles tomorrow, so the car will be suitably charged, or you’ve got a fleet vehicle and I know your workflow tomorrow needs you to do 200 miles, so it’ll make sure your work vehicle is going to get priority over your personal vehicle. It’ll know what I’ve got in my battery. All that stuff’s going to need an agent running in a secure enclave in the home. But what you don’t want is unauthorised agents making those decisions at national scale. what does an approved AI agent look like as part of a smart energy system? In the future, that’ll be 50-100 kilowatts of demand being orchestrated. How does the grid know what it needs at national compared to local level? That’s complex; hundreds of millions of devices in near real- time will need to be talking to each other. I don’t think AI is such all-encompassing. For me, it’s orchestration. It’s things happening in real time that enable us to keep our grid balanced and enables us to have the lowest cost energy as consumers. I don’t see anyone thinking about that top- down, bottom-up orchestration layer. I’ve been working with a PhD graduate who’s just published a thesis around fair energy systems. How to build an orchestration engine that thinks about fairness? Fairness is not just for the consumer. How do we make it fair that we don’t overload the distribution network? So how do we build a fairness engine that can look at all these different factors and say, so right now, the fairest price that you can have for your energy, based on all these factors, is 7p per kilowatt hour. What you’re suggesting is a completely different way of looking at domestic energy consumption.
Do you see that happening? It has to happen, but it’s a gnarly problem. There are 150 million assets delivered by countless different types of organisations all doing their own thing at that bottom-up level. The ISO standards are there. There are standards that they could adopt. The challenge is every organisation will read the standard and make a slightly different interpretation. Ultimately, standards are the same, but firmware is very different, leading to interoperability problems. If there were a single digital delivery body accountable for making sure that every one of those assets works effectively, we could put a grid connect certificate on every single device that conforms to this standard. There are countless industry bodies, all with differing expertise and focuses; they should be working this out between them. The DCC is an extremely secure network that will be in every home by 2030 - we could be using as that part of that orchestration engine. But there’s no one body that owns the top-down, bottom-up standards that can pull us together. It’s a system-level architecture, and it’s an orchestration problem. A lot of moving parts. Your readers will remember that when we started the mobile journey it was difficult because every country would do things slightly differently. The 3GPP standards group was a working body set up at a global scale in 1998 to make sure we had interoperability across all countries. It seemed like a complex problem, but we got the right people in the room that owned the direction. We csme up with standards that ensured that the generators at the top level can take signals from the asset in your home at an aggregated level. The film industry went through this too. The DCI was set up in 2002 to establish digital cinema standards worldwide and that worked. It took a few years but we got there. We’ve also done it in telco, the Internet, open banking; we have the best open banking anywhere in the world. Even
If you’ve got an Octopus Intelligent Go tariff, between midnight and 5.30am, that’s when your energy’s cheaper because there is loads available. But that could be happening right now. An intelligent energy system would say, right now, here’s the cheapest energy, so actually, I’m going to boost your car. I’m going to boost your hot water cylinder. Australia does that now making hot water hotter, which is alright, but there is so much more potential. Where are we now in terms of consumption and renewables? Well, today we’ve got 12% 14% gas, 4% biomass, 20% wind, 27% solar, 2% hydro, and probably about 15% import, I guess, looking at my screen here. I think yesterday might have been a bit higher from a wind perspective. Over a yearly period of getting a not insignificant number of days where certainly our fossil fuels requirements come down. The challenge is it’s the gas price that sets the energy price generally. So even if we get 98% of our energy from renewables, that last 2% that we need to buy because we haven’t got enough in the renewables is what will set the price. If we had local energy solutions systems available that could fill that 2% gap, the generator doesn’t need to buy the most expensive stuff, it just says, right, for the next two hours, you might want to take your reserves from 60% down to 20% because that takes it off, or that additional demand off the grid. That’s a real game changer. And if you had a wish list of what two or three things would you like to see happen, what would they be? It’s not a technology problem, nor a capital thing. It’s a coherent architecture that considers the bottom up and the top down, much like a laptop, it looks at all the external inputs, all the data that’s on your device, on a screen what you need to see. Ideally, we need an energy operating system that says, from the top down and the bottom up, all these things are connected, can talk to each other, they all remain secure. When something doesn’t work, there’s the loop that deals with that exception to make sure it still provides the services you need. We need an energy operating system for all our infrastructure in the UK.
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MAY 2026 Volume 48 No.2
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