Good morning, everyone. So yeah, we're about to start webinar today. We're just going to wait maybe 30 seconds or so, so to allow more people to join. But yeah, we're almost ready to start. I'll get that recorded. We're back now. Great. So good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, Overcoming Interpretability Challenges in Home Energy Management. My name is Ricardo Lopez, and I lead the home energy management research at LCP Delta. Today, I'm joined by a combination of experts in this topic. So first, my colleague Hamza. He's been working with us for a number of years, but also we have two industry experts today with us, Brian from Gib Energy and Travis from Solis. Before we start with this, I'd like to also mention that also we have off screen support by Rishi in case you're interested to hear more about the home research. Please join and ask. Yeah, before we begin, I'll go. I'll talk through what you can see on the screen in front of you. You should be able to see the slides and videos of the speakers. You also see a resource list on the bottom left corner where you can access additional material on today's topic. Under the Speaker tab in the top navigation, you'll find our contact details. In case you would like to follow up with any of us afterwards. The webinar is being recorded and will be emailed to you tomorrow so you can rewatch it or share it with anyone you want to. But most importantly, we encourage you to use the Ask a Question feature in the top navigation panel. Feel free to submit questions at any time. We will do our best to address as many as possible during the webinar, but if we don't get to yours, we will sure that we follow up afterwards. And finally, you can also customize your view by moving and resize the different windows. If you prefer, you can switch off the extra panels and focus only on the slides. Right. So before we before continue to directly to the webinar, I'd like to just take just a quick moment to explain who are at LCP Delta, in case you're not familiar with us. So in a nutshell, at CP Delta, we help our clients to invest in and navigate the energy transition with different solutions such as consultancy, data and technology products and subscription research covering the whole energy value chain from generation to customer demand. For today's topics, we are actually focusing in the area of customer demand and we were talking about home energy management, which is part of the residential energy research. And we talk different type of topics including interpretability, today's topics with a variety of databases and in depth reports, right. So there are different items today in the agenda. Will we first starting with the definitions, then we will be talking about the key findings or later support Hammington operability, state of the market. Then we will take a short time to go for a presentation from our guest from Gibb Energy and Solis. Then we will have enough time to go for a discussion among us. So yeah, let's start now with some definitions. So first I would like to start just with with saying what do we mean by home energy management? So at LCP Delta, we see home energy management at the Centre of the home. So this can be a piece of hardware, it can be embedded into a home energy asset or it could be in the cloud. These assets should be or this home energy management should be, should have connectivity and should be interpretable and most important should be autonomous to decide when to optimise the energy also should be able to receive some external signals such as weather or energy price and it should react or benefit to use cases. Why are these just cases? So we have categorized in LCP delta into two home values, which is the core of this home energy management. This is an example, this optimization of energy generated by PV or reacting to time of year studies. And if the system is more advanced, let's say, you can also react to some system values, so like flexibility or community values. Finally, we are going to just quickly mention what we come into our definition of the Delta framework. So for us, home energy management can be categorized under 2 criteria, number of assets and values accessed by this home energy management. So the number of assets will be the role in this framework and the columns will be the the system value. So an example, if a system is able to optimise one asset at a time and accessing just one value will be at the bottom left. But the more advanced, the more technologies can be optimized and the more values it can access, it moves to the top right. So I think that's it for the definitions. And now I want to yeah, hand over to my colleague Hamsa, which will be talk about their latest findings in the interpretable to set of the market. So over to you, Hamsa. Yep, thanks. Thanks Ricardo. So yeah, for for this part, I'm going to to share the key findings from our latest report on the state of entropability in the home energy management market today and from from our latest report. So as Ricardo mentioned, as you know, home energy management rely on connectivity and communication between different type of energy assets from the EV charging, the solar PV, HVAC systems, all this different energy assets in order to access different value streams as the ones that Ricardo showed us before. And yeah, and communication and connectivity is, is the key part in terms of home energy management systems. And today the home energy appliance market is undergoing we can say our connectivity change and let's break it into two, two parts. 1st, the connectivity and we can see that it's expanding for all energy asset. But we, we can see that battery storage and EV charge point and also solar inverter are emerge as the most connected asset in the home energy Management Today. In construct, we have the HVAC systems that currently like have a lower level of connectivity, but we still see an ongoing investment in, in, in terms of connectivity for this type of asset. And we also anticipate the market to increase in terms of connectivity across all the home energy management appliances and same for integration. So we've been following the integration of all this type of assets in home energy management market. And as I mentioned, with the connectivity rates are on the rise, we we've seen that home energy management players are racing to connect this type of appliances from the PV and the EV charge point inverters and all the energy assets or residential energy assets. And as you can see here, PV and EV charge point have been the most significant integrate integration in terms of home energy management ecosystem. And we've been following that for since 2022. And they've been like the most integrated type of assets. And we also seen the steady growth for battery storage as well, while HVAC systems are seeing a more gradual digital transformation. But yeah, it remains slower compared to this other type of assets. And as I mentioned it, it's because of the connectivity rates and yeah and which hindering like ham players to integrate this type of assets. So this is all good news, but what's the problem? The problem is fragmentation. And as more energy assets are getting connected today from the EV charge point to decades of old HVAC systems, they often operate in isolation. Each appliance or sometimes type of appliances might use different communication protocols and standards, which creates sometimes some sort of inefficiencies in terms of how this type of acid talk to each other in terms of optimise the energy use and sometimes the self consumption optimization are responding to grid signals. And here where the entropiability becomes critical and because it's the only way we ensure that all this appliances can talk to each other in order to access this value streams that we're talking about. So connectivity and integration is expanding, but without interruptibility we'll end up with some disconnected energy ecosystems. And to unlock the full potential of HEMS, we need a common standards and protocols or like standard ways of communication that and the more appliances or connected appliances we have, the more urgent this becomes. And, and for that, we have seen the market trying to do something to, to solve this issue. And we have seen many type of protocols and standard that are being offered by different type of players in the market. And 1st part of this all this protocol is first the proprietary protocol. So we have seen many manufacturers still prioritize control over elaboration or being open to other type of assets using some closed or proprietary protocol to lock the customer into their ecosystem. And this is particularly more prevalent in the HVAC systems which are like relatively older technologies than EV Chargepoint or battery storage or like PV and enrichers. And this, this closed system can create sometimes technology silos, forcing homeowners to juggle multiple vendors and apps to which reduce the potential for energy optimization between all these type of assets. Even when sometimes manufacture will claim that they have open systems, sometimes mostly with, with the, with Modbus as, as, as the protocol they use. And they also add on some proper proprietary layers to it, which restrict the whole potential or the true intropability. And the second thing is open protocols. And we have seen progress in, in terms of all the open protocols that are being offered in in the market today, but it's still has challenges. And the main challenge is fragmentation again. So we have seen many types of fragmentation. First in terms of assets. So we have protocols that are very asset specific like OCPP for AV charging estuary ready for heat pump and sometimes suspect for PV and solar panels, which they really exceed in the niche, but they fail to address the broader integration for the HEM or home energy management ecosystem. And then another type of fragmentation is the region of fragmentation. And sometimes some standards are often tied to a local regulation or a market focus. For example, we have the EE bus that is really good in terms of all the use cases that has, but it's still more prevalent in in in Germany than other markets in Europe. And another type of fragmentation is the use cases and some some protocols that support mainly some great services more than home values, for example, like self consumption optimization. So we have seen overlapping efforts as well. So we have seen initiatives like Matter E bus, Mercury S2 Open ETR, they, they sometimes overlap in terms of use cases and what they can do, which sometimes make manufacturers forced to choose between this competing standards that support multiple services sometimes. And consequences of all this is again fragmentation, which yeah, some leads the market to some sort of inefficiency and developers will waste like resources to be more tailored to specific type of use cases, especially manufacturers, which leads to fragmentation. So this is the, this was the the state of the standard and protocol in the harm energy management system. But there's another approach that also players are taking is cloud API. They're trying to bypass the fragmentation in protocols by developing their own interface to interact with other third party players, but it also has some sort of fragmentation to it as well. It's still like every manufacturer will have or operate differently in terms of authentication methods or other formats or control commands. Sometimes it's very limited in terms of what you can do with the Cloud API all way it only allows you like to turn on, turn off the the energy appliances which make make it also a challenge in terms of interpretability. In terms of ACID, we have seen that manufacturer are increasingly developing Cloud API interface. We can see here like mainly PV inventor and batteries that offer more Cloud API interface to get integrated, but we're also seeing an increase in terms of the other type of asset like HVAC systems and also if it charge points. Now we're moving to regulation and and as you might know, like with any emerging technology, regulation has a very big potential accelerate market and it's the same for how many management. But today for him, we haven't seen, we haven't seen many clear regulation that's mandating certain protocols or certain way of communication. But we have seen a few regional initiatives or voluntary framework that offer, I can say early signals what could be a road map for the future. And 1st, we have the example of the Germany's paragraph 14A, which requires the energy asset to communicate to the grid operator. And it doesn't really mandate a certain protocol, but it identifies EU bus as a compliant protocol, which can push the manufacturer with this open standard. We have seen also the the EU Code of conduct, it's a voluntary initiatives that encouraging players to adopt best practices for smart energy appliances and it's still optional, but yeah, it's remote collaboration in terms of yeah entropiability. And then we have third one is the past 1878 and 1879 in the UK, which is also some guidelines for smart appliances developed by business Department of Energy and net Zero in the UK, which also enables our design to enable entropiability in home energy management market. So we have seen hints of regulation in terms of interpolability in this market, but most of them still voluntary or or not mandatory regulation. But at least we have seen interest from policymakers words, yeah, the potential of interpolability in residential energy optimization market. And finally, as regulation is not there yet, how the energy or the home manager management players are the win to overcome or to bypass the this fragmentation and this challenges today. So I have seen two type of approaches. First, as I mentioned before, all this upper protocol and standards initiatives like Matter E, Boss, Mercury and S2, they're trying to create some universal language or appliances to communicate regardless of their type or brand. But yeah, as I mentioned, there's still fragmentation to it, but at least they're putting their groundwork for future integration. But the second approach and most important one today that we've seen is partnerships and and partnerships have become the go to fix the fragmentations and companies are collaborating. For example, we we can see that EVHROEM partner with the solar inverter to make cross device capabilities in terms of that data sharing control everything and then it works for now, but it's not it's not a cure to interpret. It's more like a pad. And because each collaboration requires biz book engineering, which and a lot of efforts to make and also it end up in into silos that they don't, we don't want in the ham market, which excludes, for example, some slower smaller players that can do this type of partnership. So the, the, the bottom line of this is the market is really making progress, but through interpretability, we require a mix of industrial collaboration and regulatory push. And until then we see partnerships and this open protocols are the best tools available today for to overcome this kind of fragmentation. I think this is. Conclude the state of the inter probability in the home management market today. So back to you Ricardo for to explore the insight from key players that shape in the market. Great. Thanks Sam. So that's a very interesting, I think this, I think we all can agree that we are in a critical stage of inter probability. There's great opportunities and it will Dan will say how, how we evolved, right. But yeah, I think it's time now to hear a bit of our guests and experts in the from the industry. So I'm going to pass it over to you. Brian will just going to give us some presentation from Give Energy and then to Travis from Solis. So over to you. Good morning. Yes. So Give Energy is a multi year company now, but we have several thousand in stores a week. We work in domestic and commercial markets. So we are fully British owned. We have a Chinese factory that's that's owned by ourselves. So we have full end to end security and quality compliance. We're just completing our 27,000 and one compliance and obviously 9001 and 14,000 and one in our factory. Our software stack works across both our domestic and commercial portfolio. So where we're partnering on flexibility for the grid, we're doing that across the base ranging from three kilowatt to four MW inverters working in battery farms down to individual EV charges. We have a portfolio that covers individual battery inverters. We also have combined battery inverters. The Franklin collection is a high voltage which goes up to A12 kilowatt inverter. And on the commercial side we start at 50 kilowatts and go up to a container with four MW hours of storage in it. Our software stack is cloud based. So we have integration with third parties, Octopus for example, in the flex markets through our cloud down to our devices and through Mercury. We'll be looking at making that compliant with all of the open protocols that that we need to. I have to solace. Thank you, Brian. Hi, everybody. My name is Travis Snyder. I'm the Product Manager for Europe. I just wanted to say thank you for taking your time to come to this webinar. I'm starting off on the 1st slide with Solace just to explain a little bit further of what's important to us. Solace is a global company and we're in every major market and we've typically been a very hardware driven company. In the past the five years we've transitioned to be a bit more of a balance because we see that so much, so many changes are coming, especially with dynamic tariffs and DRM demand response. And so and also on the frontier is AIAI within our system is being released actually next month. So it's very exciting for us. And then we are constantly working with EMSHEMS companies to bring that energy management to the home and also to buildings. So on the next slide, I'm just going to show you I'm sure a lot of you are aware just of our our product range. This is our just our storage which you know is heavily focused on the you know the energy market because of the charging and discharging and the connectivity. And we also have a regular grid grid tide only and PV inverters. But this is our off grid AC couple AC couple of if you're, if you're familiar is basically it's no PV, it's just battery connected and then you're just charging and discharging on cheap energy prices and either using it later or selling it. So, but we're seeing a big growth in these markets where you're buying and selling energy. Then we have our single phase hybrid, our eight through 15 K three phase low voltage hybrid, very popular 10K, three phase hybrid. And then our commercial inverters are 20K and our 50K. So over to you, Ricardo. Great, Thank you both for all the this nice presentation of what this company is doing. I think now it will be good to yeah to to start discussion among us. I think we've we've presented a lot of nice information around. And also please do the attendees ask questions. I would like to start this, yeah, this discussion with maybe going to you or Brian. And so Hamsa presented a lot of really nice information in terms of the standardized fragmentation and know how is happening in terms of hamming and interpretability. I would like to ask you in terms of from your daily base and work with given energy, what what are the currently, what are the most significant challenges you've been facing achieving this interpretability? Yes, in my role I'm head of IoT so I deal with everything from connecting to 3rd party companies down to the on premise devices and making sure that's reliable all the way down. The integrations we have today are all private API, so either we have worked with a third party to work with their API, or they've worked directly with us with our API. And that was really good. When the market was in a nascent state the last 10 years or so, everyone was innovating and bringing new devices to the market, Bringing out functionality didn't exist before and you needed private API to access that functionality. But if you think about being a Flex aggregator, for example, you might be dealing with a million devices in the field from 40 or 50 different vendors. You've got to implement 40 or 50 different API's. Each one of those might cost 10 to 100,000 lbs to integrate and test. So that puts your startup cost through the roof. So what the industry as a whole has been doing for some time now is developing open standards so that if all the company is in the industry, that's then a new player come onto the market, integrate with that one standard and suddenly have all those devices available. Now, I think that the leading ones for the, as you said, E bus and open ADR, Open ADR 2 turned out to be the lame duck. It was almost impossible to implement in real life because the complexity of it. Open ADR 3 and 3.1, I think of where we're going. They have rethought about how it works in real life, how the interactions between different businesses work over that protocol, and it's now a point where it can be implemented in in a sensible amount of time. If we look at New Zealand, for example, their National Grid is based on open ADR. So they have built open ADR individual devices. You then have what's called a top node, which controls a set of devices. And what you can do is build some top nodes that integrate into another virtual device. So for every substation, they have a an open ADR node that is representing the aggregation of the devices on that substation. They then feed that up into the medium voltage and the high voltage layers and they have open ADR working at those layers as well. So the grid can talk down through those layers down to individual devices, but if a particular substation is overloaded, it can direct flex to that one substation. Now that's working across 29 DN OS across 3 million people. They've done it over two or three years and they found that to be very successful. So having that commonality has enabled them to build a flexible grid. And that's what we now need to do across the rest of the world and what initiatives like Mercury are doing. And I think a lot of people misunderstand Mercury. Mercury is not going to be an open protocol. It's going to standardize one or many existing open protocols and essentially put a logo on the device to say this is compatible with a set of protocols. And that way a new player in the market can become Mercury compatible as a vendor or as an energy provider can implement those protocols and know that any Mercury device, anything labeled as Mercury compatible, will work with their services. And in Mercury, the important thing is communicating that to the consumer that we're not just saying they're technically compatible, but we're saying that they are also documented as being compatible. The end user knows how to connect to an engine provider and the test house knows how to test it is compatible. So that the logo is is on there. And we're currently, the project's been going for six weeks. We're currently evaluating all the open protocols around the world to see what is the first set to be authorized as part of Mercury to be able to do Flex. Great. No, I think that's it. That makes sense what you're saying. And also I think that we have a couple of questions from regarding Mercury. I think that there's there's a lot of expectation or questions around that. Before moving to that, I'd like to ask actually Travis. So we yeah, so we we've seen, we've seen well Hamster mentioned a bit of some lists of how companies are overcoming interpretability issues at the moment. And one of them some be part of this initiatives as Brian mentioned Mercury, but also partnerships, static partnerships with other companies or so I wanted to ask like so we've seen many in the last year. We still believe that they're important. How do this how do static partnership or what is the role that those plays in so this today and or how do you think as well play in the future Travis? Yeah. So what we're doing right now is with strategic partnerships, we are basically using company EMS companies for partnership. And we've actually had to hire a few more people just to do this work because it's actually a quite a bit of work because those companies need to come to us. And you know, either they're doing our API via control of that or our Modbus, or if they want to use our Sun spec Modbus, they can use that. And so that's, I think we're over 30 now EMS companies that are working with and they're very local. So you have different EMS companies in like Italy, different in the US, different in the UK and some are spread throughout a few, a few countries, but it's, it seems to be very local. And we've especially in the Nordics, they're very local. You don't see the Nordic EMS companies anywhere South and so we're doing a lot of work there and we have like a whole team arranged to that and also interoperability, we're doing some work with E node right now. I don't know if you mentioned that in the slides, I don't think I saw E node, but you know E node is basically going to give us connection between all of these device through API connection. And and also on the tariff front, that's also interoperability I believe because we're bringing the tariffs into our cloud platform so the customers can see the price of the tariff. So we're working with Norpool and right now actually I saw in the chat there's this person from Flat Peak and we're working with Flat Peak right now we're doing integration. So we're we're bringing in customers tariffs so they can charge and discharge the battery based off that tariff. So, and you know, so a lot, and I probably Brian can talk about this a little bit more, is there's so much work for us as manufacturers because the market hasn't made-up its mind on what it wants to do because really we're still in the infancy stage. I mean, when I started the business, like I think 413 years ago, 14 years ago, you know, we didn't have all these controls, we didn't have all of these, we didn't have storage inverters, right? So I think maybe SMA was one of the first ones to come out with a, a storage inverter. I mean, that was mainly for off grid. But you know, so we are developing at such a crazy rate right now. And, and, and everybody's trying to muster together and try to figure out what the future is. And really we have no clue what the future is going to be right now. We're just, we're hammering away at it and in different sections. And, and I think that we're all a little lost and companies like like Mercury are kind of trying to say, OK, hold on everybody, let's get together or open ADR. But still it's a lot of work for us because then we, we're, we're saying, OK, we should probably do this, this, this, this, and, and we don't know who's going to win. So yeah, we'll invest. We'll all this money over here, but it might not be for anything. And so it's, it's a guessing game, Ricardo. It's difficult. Yeah, I know definitely that. Yeah, I think you mentioned something important that how is the moment. I think OEMs you're saying it should play and they are playing an important role there. I think I wanted to ask you quickly something Hansa, so you presented in the slide how, how there's different, we have identified many different type of collaborations around. But in your experience or how you'll be seeing in the market, how I think what do you think how important is this collaboration? Have you seen, I mean Travis clearly mentioned some about you know like proximate integrator with an OEM, but we've seen other, have you seen other type of collaboration or how does that play some role today? Yeah, exactly. So as as Travis mentioned, we have seen a lot of OEMs now is trying to like partner with this integrators where we call them which are hams developers that try to do everything around communication. They, they they put the work there for other players like OEMs, energy retailers to work with. So to bypass all the the technical issues of entropiability today as he mentioned, you know that is an actor that do does another type of partnership where I've seen is between OEMs. So we have and an EV charger and OEM that will partner with specific PV inverter or an HVAC company that so their their product can talk to each other. But still it's not a broader type of capability, but it's still a way to to have some sort of interpretability and to create and hem ecosystem for these players. Yeah. We're also seeing partnerships in terms of of energy retailers partner with some sort of manufacturers to maybe participate in grid services or flexibility services. Yeah. I think those are the main partnership that we're seeing today in the market. Great. Thanks, Samsa. I'm just going to look about some of the questions in the in the current section and I think there's a few about Mercury. So I don't know, Brian, if you could maybe, yeah, expand a little bit more about your views on Mercury and how the role will take or is expected to take in the in the industry in the evolution. Yes. The Mercury, as I said, is not a protocol. It is a standard that will encompass protocols and it's going to be where the industry collaborates and says, right, these are the protocols that we're all going to decide on. There are I think 55 companies in the group ranging from energy providers to aggregators to intermediates, vendors, OEMs, everyone involved in the energy chain is in Mercury, even down to consumer rights groups. So what we're making sure in there is that a, the devices do what they say they do. So if you look at the testing procedure for an API, what it says is that if I ask you to turn down, you will send a message back in this format saying you did turn down. It doesn't actually check the device did actually turn down. So the first piece of testing will be in the compliance test in the test house when it goes through its CE marking or other international marks to make sure that actually behaves as a flexible energy device. And then the second piece will be around how that is communicated to the consumer. So we're just discussing at the moment what text needs to go into the user manual, what text needs to be on the outside of the box. So the consumer knows that this is a flexible device and how we are going to ensure that the consumer knows how to pair it with an aggregator and energy supplier in order to be able to earn money for flexibility. And then the final thing that we're just starting to discuss at the moment is we obviously want to avoid having stranded assets. There are in the last 24 months, there are a couple of companies who've left the industry, leaving stranded devices because they shut the cloud down. We need to make sure that when a vendor cloud disappears, whether that's because they stopped selling that range of products or there's an M&A or they went bankrupt, in any of those cases the consumer is not left with a device that now cannot participate in those markets. Both for the consumers financial return, but also if we're going to have a fully renewable flexible grid, we need those devices to participate and frankly we need all of them to participate to be able to do it well. So those are the pieces that we're working on. It's a very big group. It's making quick progress where the government incentives are looking to complete in three to four years. We're looking to complete the first version in Q2 of this year having started 1st of January. So you're going to see something coming out, Mercury in this and then it will be a living. Just going to say these are the protocols. There will be a process where new protocols, new devices and written up into the standards. Great. Thank you. Yeah, that's really interesting, Brian Travis. I I think so with with touch a really high level in terms of the regular active framework. And as we can see that so far we haven't seen a strong or significant impact yet. We've seen some expectation of how you can evolve. I'd like to hear your view on yeah. How do you see this, this current regulatory framework in terms of interpretability? Do you think regulation should push harder, should maybe step back or could be a collaboration in your view? From your view and Solis, what would be the the idea of let's say? Yeah, for me, regular framework makes my job much more difficult because if, but also it, it gives clear guidance in the same sense. So if they, if they give you say 3 years to do something, usually, usually, sometimes you only get a year and sometimes you don't hear about what's required. So then you're late to the game. But I, I, I do like some stuff that's coming out of, you know, for example, Sweden. Sweden has a like a frequency balancing market and you know, they incentivize customers by paying them to balance their grid basically and through third parties. And then the, you know, the market kind of came up with the the solution and that, that, that was really good. You know, for customers, they could essentially it pushed the market so fast that they had to slow down their, you know, that that initiative. So I think you could get your solar system paid back in 18 months. I think it's a little bit longer now, but like it really fixed their grid almost immediately. But like other players that are pushing things like like, for example, in Germany with the E bus, we don't have E bus and we're looking at it right now. Do we do it? Do we not do it? And, and that's, you know, and if we don't do it right now, I'm going to spend the money doing and putting it into our devices that then we'll be way behind and, and then our customers will be left behind also that with all of our distributors. So it, it's better if they make it clear to us sometimes, but I prefer personally, I prefer the market to, to make the decision because then then it seems to be more widespread across multiple countries because I'm dealing with over 28 countries right now. And it's a headache when you have OK over here, you're doing this, over here, you're doing this over here, you're doing this. It's such a headache for for me in general. So I think that answers the question. There's so many questions in the chat. By the way, there's tons. Yeah. Just just to follow on that, I think, yeah, we were talking this chat and this morning, hams and I and yeah, the key part as well, which is like quite localized. But as you said, when our company look yours have a presence across different markets, it's quite complicated. Yeah. Yeah. Can I take a few of the questions, Ricardo that are related to Modbus? Yes. Pleasure. There's, there's a lot of people on here saying we should, we should standardize Modbus, we should make a common set of registers within Modbus. Just to clarify for people that don't understand Modbus. Modbus is a protocol where you can put numbers into boxes. Basically there's 65,000 boxes you can put them into and each manufacturer will put their information into different boxes. Simple as that. The protocol is just, you know, read box 7, tell me what numbers in it. You don't know what that means unless you know the manufacturer's data sheet. Now the problem with Modbus for the future is it's a completely open electronic transfer. There is no security on it at all. And we are as a as a industry, we are building a nation state asset. If you were a malicious actor, a malicious state actor and you could take control of a million batteries and dump them into the grid instantaneously, you could take the grid down. So we've got to be absolutely certain that all devices in the future are secure. They are not accessible to third parties, whether that's for privacy reasons. Your electricity metering is private to you. If I could see your Metre, I can tell if you're on holiday and I can tell if I should burgle your house today. So we have to have security from that side of the side of it and from the nation state side as well. Now Modbus can't do that. I think the future for on premise is going to be Matter and matter 1.4 particularly. That is a fully secure protocol. It can run over multiple backbones, it be radio or it can be wired and it is standardized across all manufacturers. So it deals with virtual devices. So my device can say right, I'm a fridge. If it's a fridge freezer, it can say I'm a fridge and I'm a freezer. It can say I'm a heat pump and I'm a water heater for example. And that way a hens can deal with it without having to understand that particular manufacturer's device. So I think that's the future of on Premise and that will take over from Modbus over the next 5 or 10 years. And I think what we're going to see for legacy devices is Matter bridges onto Modbus controllers so that you don't have to replace the device. You can just put a dongle on the side or some little tiny box, maybe a $1020.00 box that can receive Matter and convert that to the Modbus implementation on that device. And I think we're going to see vendors coming out with those that we don't end up with stranded assets as a few in here about various protocols and whether they should be considered by Mercury. Essentially Mercury is considering at the moment all protocols in the field. So I think there's 10 or 12 protocols Ebus as to open ADR matter of various others OCPP and we're looking at what the use cases are from the energy supply side and what the use cases are from the consumer side and working out which protocols have the best overlap onto those use cases. We're not going to be saying this is the one protocol to use. We're going to be saying, here's the two or three that have the best fit. And what we may be doing later is defining bridges between them and saying if if you want to be OCPP on one side and S2 on the other, then here's how you would bridge that data together. We're not going to implement that, but we're going to say how it would be done so that the cover bit can be done once and then each vendor can implement their own bridge if they want to. Travis, would you have similar thoughts on that? I actually wanted to ask you a question, Brian, because how do you see Mercury, you know is off premise and you said matters on premise. Can you join those two? Yes, so there is an. In fact, there is work going on right now to define a bridge between open ADR and matter because they are slightly different concepts. The bridge definition will be here's how the concepts map to each other. It's not going to be implementation of that, but companies around the world could implement a matter open ADR bridge. Now I think that takes into the HEMS conversation quite well because today we're talking about flex on a device by device basis and that's what we see in the market today. Your EV charge at your thermostat, your water heater would be a flex device. But we can get much better flex in a household that has multiple devices. So if you have a heat pump and a battery, what matters to the grid is what happens in the cable to the road. So rather than turning the heat pump down and making the Cassima cold, instead, that premise could supply the energy to the heat pump from the battery. And from the grid point of view, it has the household has just flexed, but there is no impact to the comfort of the consumer. We have to be really, really careful in the work that we do. We don't override the desires of the consumer because if they find that their house isn't warm anymore or their EV isn't charged when they want it to be because of flex, they're just going to turn flex off. And once they've done that, that's a set of resources that are not available on the grid anymore. And I say right, because my wife. I think what hems comes in is if we have cloud hems as we have today then we can implement the cloud side protocols on the cloud. So open ADR for example on the vendors cloud. The vendor can then use private API to send that down to the device and have the device Flex, but treat the house as a as a large virtual device. Or we can have direct open ADR, for example, implementation on the device and then the householder can connect that device on its own to a Flex network. Now the problem with that is if you then want to bring in HEMS later and manage the house, you're managing the house minus that device that opted out because you can't have two devices in control. So I think what we need to be doing today is thinking about HEMS, even if we only have one device and communicating it as HEMS so that as householders bring in more and more devices over time, that HEMS functionality can span across multiple devices. I think there's a dangerous slope to go down if we all market all this one device is directly flexible because we're eating up the market for HEMS later and HEMS is much more effective for grid flex than individual devices are. It recently I reached out, ESP from Ireland, reached out to me and like a third party, I was attached to them. They they wanted to work with us for hams and they were actually asking about I triple E 1547 and also Sun spec Modbus. And so I'm seeing a lot of customers, you know, just ask me constantly for different things that they want to use in different territories for the hams and, and, and so it's difficult for me. I keep saying it's difficult for me because it's so much work to, to implement like an open ADR, a sun spec mod bus, I triple E 1547 and now so many more with Mercury. So I wanted to go back to maybe ask you, Brian, a question after I say. What I want to say is for us right now, most of our customers are not using HEMS, only maybe say less than 5%. And so we're having to do that job. Are they? Are they doing that because they only have one device? Or they could use a HEMS but aren't. Right. They could use a HEMS, but aren't they're just using our PV inverter just for storage and by and you know, producing power and buying energy and selling energy, multiple different reasons. So, so most of them are not using it right now And and I wanted to know what you think it will that drastically changed in the next five years or are you going to be doing it within your cloud? Are you know, are you going to be focused more on external? So today we the vendor cloud works absolutely fine when you have one device or if you have a cluster of devices working as one, you know, as a set of bridged inverters, for example, they're all working as one inverter. Perhaps you melted boxes, but they're controlling, you know, based on eco mode or export mode. The place I see that HEMS has value is when that consumer now has an EV charger and a battery and solar. Maybe they have a connected washing machine, maybe they have air conditioning in the summer. Those are the devices where when you have more than one of them, that's where HEMS comes in. And we've started to see this. So we have an EMS for a commercial side. Where we are doing that controls for doing that in the cloud support devices and I think that that's where the consumer will see value in HEMS where you're trying to manage those devices as a cluster if you take. That. Overnight cheap energy. Are they prioritizing charging their EV or charging their battery or charging their whole washer tank? As we start to bring heating into this as well, that's that's when HEMS really becomes of age. Yeah, sorry, Brian, just just being conscious all the time. I think first of all, yes, my, my connection was dropping and wide enough, but I think I would like to wrap up and just ask each we use just a, a bit of a the view of of course, if we have the answer of this, we will be in a different position, right? Like, but I would like to ask you how, how do you see the vision of of integrality evolving him? Like anything you see in the in the short midterm, will there be perhaps, I don't know, one or two standards or or initiatives like the one brain saying about mercury or how do you see this evolving in the Yeah, if we have, if we can see the future, what will be your take then? So maybe start with Travis? Yeah, for me, I think it'll be local hems for the next two to five years. And you and I say that because the most advanced countries right now are using those, whether that's a usually it's Sweden, Netherlands, UK and Belgium, sometimes Italy, sometimes Germany. Those are the, what is the, the, where I see most of the advancements comes out and they're usually a lot of local hems. And then probably, and then from, you know, maybe 4-4 years on and five years on, you'll see, you know, cloud at cloud hems or VPPVPP hems or maybe even energy provider hems. I don't know where it's going to go, but I don't that's my question right now. Brian, what do you think? I think that the problem with the current market is that we've sold to the geeks and they love to optimise and their plugins home automation there, they're building their own hems essentially. But that hems that they're building is quite basic. I think as vendors, you know, you're launching your AI where we're working on some optimization techniques ourselves and those are going to outperform manual optimization massively. If you have fixed timings, you're not going to do as good a job as AI can do. I think we need to sort out the revenue. The cost at the moment is borne by the vendors because the cost is in the cloud comms. You're looking at 10s of dollars a year just for the data costs for a single device to be connected to the cloud every 30 seconds, for example. And at the moment, the value is only going to the energy supplier and the consumer. We need to get some standards across the industry, similar to the advertising industry that I used to be in. If you hung a billboard, the designer got a certain amount, that the person put the paper up got a certain amount, it was all agreed as a percentage and then you all you had to decide was what the total value was. I think we're going to need to see commercial agreements like that across the market and I think today we're looking at cloud only for hems. I think we're going to see hybrid and then on premise hems. As time goes by. I think we can do a much better job with an on premise hems because you can be talking multiple times a second rather than multiple times an hour. And you know, if you think about and the kettle on your pin and provides that power for the battery, the less money you spend. So the speed of communication is really, really important there. And I think we need to move away from things like Modbus and hardwired connections into an Ethernet world. They are agnostic of what the device is. Open ADR just talks about power, energy and time. It doesn't say what you're doing with that power. And that means we can apply it to any device doing anything. So I think that's where we're going. It's going to take some time to get there and it's going to take a lot of investment to get there from all of the companies, industry and and solace and and ourselves are both driving forward in that direction. Great. And finally, Hamsa, any views on this? What would you see there? How it keeps going? Yeah. Yeah, actually, yeah. As I mentioned before, we've really seen an interest from VMS into open protocols. They've been asking like should I be involved in this initiatives or this initiative at least we, we, we can see that there is an interest to open up their ecosystem and like to be more involved in this open protocols and standards and moving on from the being like close ecosystem and proprietary standards and protocols. And we're also seeing interest from other part of the energy value chain like DSOs, energy tailors, aggregators are also like being more involved in this, especially for flexibility services and yeah, sending signals from the grid, which we think that is going to push the market to standardize. And at least if not one standard, at least have to go following case one or two or three dominant frameworks like it can be, for example, E Boss, it can be Matter Plus open AVR or S2 or Mercury. So we have seen that interest and also the policymakers are increasingly seeing the potential of standardization and communication to, to decarbonise the grid and to drive the the whole market forward. So we're really optimistic in, in that aspect, but I would think we still think that it will take time to do that. And also we expect some regional mandates like we have seen in Germany with the paragraph 14 A. We expect that we will see other markets following up the same approach, maybe in the Netherlands, France. But yeah, and in a long term, we expect an EU wide regulation that will at least go for those 3 frameworks that can work for interpretability in home energy management. Yeah. Great. No, but very interesting and I think just want to mention to all of the attendees that unfortunately we don't have the time to answer all these questions during the session, but we definitely going to follow up individually and give a real unanswered question from all the guests and. Just before we wrap up, I want to give a big thank you to our speakers, Brian Travis for sharing their insight. Today has been really interesting. I think we could just keep going talking and talking for many, many hours, I'll say. But thank you very much for joining us. We'll really appreciate your time and definitely we look forward to maybe talking future in the In Future webinars or so. And for the audience, we'd love to hear your thoughts. A short feedback form will pop up after the webinar, so please take a moment to let us know how we did and if you can share any suggestion for future topics. But thanks again. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Travis. Thanks, Hansa. Yeah, I hope to see you again and talk to you in a future webinar. Thank you, Jordan. Thank you. _1742880901876