Great news - on November 8th Council and Parliament reach a provisional agreement on eID. We take the chance to highlight the importance of this step and the role of identification and authentication as a very important pillar on the way to a digital single market and an integrated participative energy system.

More and more new market roles are using electronic services and data communication related to the energy networks. Energy service providers other European countries, energy communities and other organizations need to participate in energy market communication in order to fulfill their responsibilities. Increasingly complex tasks have to be performed simultaneously by different energy industry institutions and applications. Each of these systems faces the challenge of identifying these actors - natural persons as well as companies - reliably and securely. In addition, under European law, it is mandatory to make it available to authorized third parties from other member states.

Project EDDIE Team takes these recent developments as a trigger to highlight the importance and the potential of EIDAS/eIDs for a participative and digital energy landscape. We recommend data-sharing infrastructure operators to take a closer look into the benefits of integrating eID as a means for identifying and authenticating final customers and market parties.

In today's rapidly evolving energy landscape, the efficient management and utilization of data plays a crucial role in driving the transition towards sustainable and flexible energy systems. The European Commission has been at the forefront of promoting digitalization and interoperability across sectors to facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources, demand response mechanisms, and grid flexibility. EDDIE’s consortium partner Digital4Grids published a landscape report "Energy and Flexibility: Data Models and Interoperability Across Sectors", delving into the challenges and opportunities associated with data exchange and integration across various sectors of the energy system. The document provides valuable insights into the current state of data models, interoperability frameworks, and regulatory initiatives aimed at enhancing energy system flexibility.

The establishment of a Data Space is by nature an inter-disciplinary and market role spanning effort. Therefore, it is important to combine the expertise of the most relevant stakeholder groups when preparing its grounds. These are (a) final customers, (b) parties eligible to access data, (c) data-sharing infrastructure operators, (d) organisations for implementation, (e) standardisation experts, (f) scientists and (g) European experts. Read this article for detailed information on the team.

The overall methodology of EDDIE is oriented towards providing a dependable, scalable and extensible European Distributed Data Infrastructure for Energy Framework (EDDIE Framework). This means that the overlying European interface will be given priority, and data accessible through data-sharing infrastructure provided by metered data administrators will be available first. In parallel, and independently yet synchronised, the work on the second main objective to provide an Administrative Interface for In-house Data Access (AIIDA) to feed in-house data (2) to EDDIE Framework users will be started.