Energy management systems (EMS) are the key to helping organizations achieve energy-related goals, such as cost savings, sustainability targets and/or regulatory compliance. It opens the door for more accessible and creative solutions, but regulatory and technical hurdles often get in the way. What are the solutions to navigate this?
Tobias Mitter, CTO and Managing Director of gridX, says that incentives rather than regulations may be key. He uses the upcoming 14a regulation as an example: “There's a lot of opportunity in simplifying market design and creating incentives. Developments like 14a can be a good thing because we need to make people more able to adapt to and also incentivize their power consumption to prices or availability. If you combine 14a with dynamic tariffs…this also becomes attractive for end customers and it can point us in the right direction of becoming and making them a new normal of having this kind of mechanism on the market as well.”
Christian Feisst, Vice President Energy Management at Enphase Energy, says, “I personally believe it's not so much about having enough regulations in place or enough incentives in place. It's about reducing the hurdles for implementing new business models. I think in our industry, unfortunately, we still have too many hurdles on the regulatory side. If we manage to lower them dramatically, this would give a big push.”
Rod Buchanan, CTO and Senior Vice President at Amp X, says, “The imposed standards often lead to a very stale ecosystem. Manufacturers coming in with cutting edge solutions kind of end up with a ‘winner takes most’ situation.”
Henrik Langeland, CEO and Co-Founder of Enode, adds that clear interoperability may be the best solution: “At the end of the day, this will reduce the barriers to innovation, which is super important if we're going to overcome the challenges that we're facing.”
