On 9 July 2026, the OpenADR Alliance and Codibly co-hosted a panel on what it takes to coordinate tens of millions of flexible devices across Europe — and whether the continent is converging on a common way to do it. The session brought together the two European markets furthest along in committing to a flexibility protocol, alongside the IEC working group responsible for reconciling that choice with the wider standards stack.

Aron Lazarchick, Partner for Europe in Codibly’s e-Mobility and Renewable Energy practices — Codibly is an OpenADR Alliance Implementation Partner — convened and moderated the panel. He was joined by Laurent Schmitt of dcbel, convener of IEC TC57 Working Group 21; Tim Manandhar of UK Power Networks, who led the Energy Networks Association’s standard selection for Great Britain; and Nicholas Claaszen of ElaadNL, responsible for the Netherlands’ grid-aware charging programme. Rolf Bienert of the OpenADR Alliance hosted and moderated audience questions.

Webinar highlights

1. Two markets evaluated independently and reached the same answer
Great Britain’s ENA working group and a Dutch group of three charge point operators and three DSOs each ran a structured comparison against written requirements. Both selected OpenADR.

2. The Dutch architecture was shaped by law, not only by protocol features
Dutch DSOs may not control customer assets directly; control routes through an aggregator. OpenADR’s separation of responsibilities matched that legal constraint. Austria, permitted direct control, took another route.

3. OpenADR and the IEC standards meet rather than compete
Working Group 21 found the CIM flexibility package and OpenADR 3.1 largely complementary: OpenADR defines the transport and API layers, the IEC work defines ontology, formats and payloads.

4. Device-level and signal-level standards occupy different layers
IEEE 2030.5, SunSpec and Modbus suit operating the settings an inverter exposes. Utility objectives travel over OpenADR or the IEC standards to an aggregation point. Most architectures use both.

5. Agreeing on a protocol is not the same as achieving interoperability
OpenADR’s implementation freedom drove fast adoption and lets national profiles drift. Because mass-produced assets ship one firmware for their lifecycle, divergent profiles can strand a device across a border.

6. Reusable profiles are the counter-mechanism, and they already exist
The Alliance intends to publish the British, Austrian and Dutch programme descriptions as templates for other markets, and ElaadNL has open-sourced its grid-aware charging profile for reuse.

The OpenADR Alliance recorded this session. You can watch the full webinar and review the slides on the OpenADR Alliance webinar series page.

Looking ahead

The European network code on demand response will press transmission and distribution operators to harmonise programmes and products over roughly the next three years. That window is also the opportunity to align profiles before a large installed base of hardware makes divergence expensive to unwind. The protocol question is closing; the profile question is the one that decides whether a device bought in one member state is useful in another.

For the full written analysis of what convergence did and did not settle, see Europe Picked a Flexibility Protocol. That Was the Easy Part.