Greenbird wins 2020 European Energy Data Access Pilot with its Utilihive big data integration platform

Norwegian IT company Greenbird Integration Technology was announced a winner today by Elering as part of a Europe-wide competition. The company is among an elite group of solution providers and will help provide access to smart meter data to implement select pilots of innovative energy products and services during 2020. The competition was announced in the beginning of April 2020 with a mandate from European grid operators.

At the end of last year, grid operators from Spain, France, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Estonia signed a Letter of Intent to investigate launching an alliance that would connect the energy data of all Europeans, so energy companies can securely access this data and operate in any European country without barriers.

“Elering’s goal is to support achieving the EU climate targets and to empower consumers, to give them more choices, better services and lower prices for energy, flexibility and efficiency,” said Taavi Veskimägi, CEO of Elering. “Secure access to data allows companies to develop digital tools applicable to the whole European market which increase competition that bring better prices and opportunities for the end customer. This is the energy transition's next phase, putting people and solutions for homes and businesses in the center,” he stressed.

The Energy Data Access Alliance aim is to agree on standards to obtain meter data and send market messages in a secure way. There will be no super-hub, but a ‘data mesh’ where data moves directly between parties while home and business owners retain full control over their data and provide consent to access data.

Greenbird was announced as one of the winners based on its proven abilities to:

• demonstrate novel energy service, product or business model on a European scale and enter new markets;
• collaborate with European DSOs and TSOs;
• practically interface its application with the Estfeed platform and with the consent of test users access their metering data from mock data hubs and through this test services;
• be noticed at a European level.

“We are happy to announce the winners that were selected by an international committee of seven representatives of European grid operators and will be carried out during 2020,” said Kaija Valdmaa, Estfeed Product Owner. “The 10 selected projects stood out by being orientated to market integration, increasing competition with new products and services and empowered the consumer in the energy market. They are also solving important market barriers and can be successfully implemented in 3-6 months,” Valdmaa explained. “We appreciate all who participated in the European Energy Data Access Pilots 2020 competition, congratulations to the winners!”

Access to energy metering data for services and innovators today is uneven and insecure. Secure access to metering data should be available to Data Owners (i.e. ‘Consumers’) and, with their legal consent, also to energy service providers and innovators of energy services who want to use this private data (e.g. energy monitoring systems in buildings and homes, electricity package calculators, energy appliances that switch on and off according to green energy available in the grid or the energy price) to develop the energy market and provide additional services to consumers and other market participants.

“We’re delighted that our Utilihive Big Data Integration Hub has been recognized by Elering and European grid operators in this pan-European competition. We created Utilihive to simplify the development and testing of energy services using metering data. The Utilihive platform is ideally positioned to offer secure and reliable energy data access that can be used by energy services throughout Europe,” said Thorsten Heller, CEO and co-founder of Greenbird. “For our platform to be included in this list of innovation companies and leaders is a great honor.”

Utilihive is a cloud native big data integration platform purpose-built for utilities to provide streaming capabilities to handle enterprise data and machine data in a secure way. The system is resilient, reliable and highly available, ensuring 24/7 operations. Delivered as a managed service, Utilihive offers the best from cloud-native technologies and provides an elastic infrastructure with dynamic scalability for future growth.