IN Brief:
- DLMS UA and the OpenADR Alliance have agreed to work on interoperable data exchange between smart metering and flexibility systems.
- The liaison centres on mapping DLMS/COSEM meter data with OpenADR signalling for demand response, DER, and flexibility services.
- The work could help utilities connect regulated metering environments more cleanly with distributed control at homes and buildings.
DLMS User Association and the OpenADR Alliance have agreed to a formal liaison intended to improve interoperability between smart meter data exchange and the control signals used for demand response, distributed energy resources, and flexibility services at the grid edge.
The agreement is centred on a practical standards problem that has become harder as utilities expand flexibility programmes. DLMS/COSEM is widely used for secure and regulated smart metering data exchange, while OpenADR is designed for secure, two-way signalling between utilities, aggregators, and distributed assets. In many deployments, those environments sit alongside one another without a clean, standardised bridge between metering data, customer systems, and flexibility dispatch.
The liaison is intended to change that by creating a structured mapping between the two models and by coordinating technical work on how information should be interpreted across the utility-to-edge interface. The announced areas of work include development of the mapping itself, progression through international standards bodies, assessment of use cases where DLMS/COSEM could be transported over OpenADR, and coordination around certification while both organisations retain independent governance and their own certification schemes.
That is a technical development with broader operational consequences. Utilities are under pressure to scale flexibility without fragmenting their digital architecture. As EV charging, storage, smart buildings, heat pumps, and other distributed assets become more active in system balancing, the interface between metering, settlement, customer devices, and dispatch systems becomes more important. A grid-edge stack that depends on custom integrations and proprietary translations is harder to scale, harder to certify, and harder to replicate across markets.
The attraction of this liaison is that it addresses the boundary between two very different parts of the modern electricity system. Smart meters sit in a regulated and often metrologically sensitive environment. Flexibility platforms operate in a more dynamic control layer shaped by market signals, dispatch events, and customer-side assets. Bringing those layers closer without collapsing them into a single architecture could help utilities preserve meter integrity while still using distributed flexibility more effectively.
The timing is also notable. OpenADR 3.0 has been gaining ground in flexibility and DER applications, including recent work in Great Britain on interoperable flexibility dispatch. At the same time, DLMS/COSEM remains one of the most established international models for electricity metering data exchange. The next phase of grid digitalisation is therefore less about inventing entirely new languages than making existing standards work together more predictably at scale.
If that effort succeeds, the result will be less duplication in system integration and a clearer path for utilities, vendors, and flexibility providers trying to connect regulated infrastructure with customer-owned assets. In a power system that is becoming more distributed, that kind of disciplined interface work increasingly decides whether digital flexibility remains a pilot concept or becomes infrastructure.
