As energy systems become more connected, heat pumps, EV chargers, battery storage systems, and other major energy-consuming devices increasingly need to exchange information about energy use and adjust their consumption in response to grid conditions.
This shift is happening across energy markets worldwide, as grids adapt to growing electrification and more distributed energy consumption and generation. Germany is one of the countries already translating it into concrete regulatory requirements.
One of the key standards enabling this communication is EEBUS (Energy Efficient Building), a manufacturer-independent communication standard for energy-related devices and systems. In Germany, it is already recognized as a suitable interface for meeting the requirements of Section 14a of the German Energy Industry Act (EnWG), which allows distribution system operators to temporarily limit the power available to certain controllable devices when there is a risk of local grid overload. EEBUS itself is not mandatory for manufacturers — at least for now.
The ecosystem around the standard is also becoming more established. In July 2026, the EEBUS Initiative launched an official certification process for implementations supporting grid control.
But agreeing on a common standard is only the beginning.
One standard doesn’t mean one implementation
The standard provides a common specification, but each manufacturer still has to turn it into working software that can run on actual devices — and make sure devices from different manufacturers can really work together.
The implementation approach also depends on which protocols are used at each layer of the §14a control chain and what role each one plays in the overall architecture.
Engineering teams interpret the specification, select the use cases relevant to their products, and make their own architectural decisions. Two devices can therefore support the same standard but implement parts of it differently. Those differences often become visible only when products from different vendors need to communicate.
Another challenge is that existing implementations may not be suitable for embedded devices. Software designed for a server environment cannot simply be transferred to a heat pump or another device with much more limited computing resources.
Solving these challenges independently is not the only option.
From specification to shared implementation
NIBE, a leading European manufacturer of heat pumps and other energy solutions, chose to address the problem by initiating an open-source EEBUS implementation for embedded devices. As NIBE’s technology partner, Sigma Software joined the initiative to design and implement the solution.
Developing it took close to a year, including the architecture, implementation of the specification, and subsequent work with products from several vendors.
The implementation is now available as open source. Manufacturers can use it instead of building the protocol layer from scratch, which, based on our experience, can save around six months of development.
There is another practical benefit: the same codebase is already being used and tested across products from different manufacturers. Interoperability issues found during these integrations can be fixed in the shared implementation, so other manufacturers using it do not have to discover and solve the same problems independently.
A working implementation can also be useful beyond individual manufacturers. For regulators and industry bodies, it can provide a practical reference for how requirements defined at the specification level translate into working software and real devices. Still a shared implementation still leaves device-specific work: mapping use cases to device behavior, testing against other vendors’ products, and preparing for certification. Find out how the Sigma Software team supports EEBUS implementation projects.
Why this matters now
Germany is already introducing concrete requirements, and other markets are moving in the same direction. As flexible energy consumption and grid management become more common, more manufacturers will need their devices to communicate with other parts of the energy system.
A standard gives devices a common language. A shared implementation can make that language easier to use consistently across products — bringing the industry closer to the actual goal: devices from different manufacturers that can reliably work together.
