Empower-X: Data Infrastructure for Intelligent Energy Systems

Empower-X is a lighthouse data space specialized in Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) and Energy Communities, designed to enable a federated, secure and auditable environment for the exchange, processing and activation of energy, mobility and urban data. Its objective is to validate—under real operational conditions—the technical, organisational and economic capabilities required to deploy an energy data space aligned with European principles of data sovereignty, decentralised governance and cross-territorial interoperability.
The lighthouse provides a real-world environment to assess how a data space facilitates distributed renewable energy integration, real-time traceability, energy behaviour prediction, flexibility management, electric mobility, sustainable urban planning and multi-actor coordination across public, private and community stakeholders.
Empower-X acts as a reference infrastructure within the DS4SSCC-DEP European project and supports urban pilots such as the PED of Rubí, integrating municipal systems, energy platforms, charging networks, urban sensors, public buildings, energy communities and the ZertiPower P2P energy-exchange platform.

Governance and Operational Roles

Empower-X is governed by an explicit governance framework defining responsibilities, access rules, technical obligations and oversight mechanisms. The model ensures:

• fairness and non-discrimination
• data sovereignty and full control by each actor
• regulatory compliance (DGA, GDPR, Data Act, metering data access)
• traceability and integrity of all operations
• interoperability with other European data spaces (CEEDS, Mobility, Built Environment)

Participants within the space may assume different operational roles:

• Data providers: public buildings, DSOs, energy communities, urban sensors, mobility fleets, CPO/EMSP, municipal information systems
• Data consumers: energy-management applications, predictive AI, urban-planning systems, mobility operators, service companies
• Processing service providers: advanced analytics, energy modelling, forecasting algorithms, digital twin simulations, flexibility orchestrators
• Infrastructure and ecosystem-service operators: sovereign nodes, federated catalogues, digital identity, auditing services
• Trusted intermediaries: controlled execution of processes on sensitive energy or citizen data (e.g. electricity consumption, individual mobility, demand patterns)

Role and permission assignment is managed through verifiable identities based on Web3 technologies and usage policies expressed through auditable digital contracts.

Technical Architecture and Secure Computation

The lighthouse integrates advanced compute-to-data and distributed execution capabilities through the Ocean Enterprise Collective, enabling algorithms to run directly on source datasets without transferring or replicating them. This approach supports compliance with:

• privacy and security requirements
• energy-data access rules (metering & consumption data)
• urban-data and mobility-data regulations
• European requirements for data sovereignty and data-space federation

The Empower-X architecture incorporates:

• Web3 protocols and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) for authentication, authorisation, auditing and non-repudiation
• Secure computation services for advanced energy analytics, AI, demand forecasting, flexibility aggregation and federated learning between cities
• Standardised containers (Docker/Kubernetes) encapsulating energy-oriented services (forecasting, mobility analytics, PED optimisation)
• A distributed ledger (DLT) providing verifiable records of transactions, energy traceability, dataset usage, governance actions and smart contracts
• Real-time compliance mechanisms validating allowed data usage, active permissions and data-retention/erasure policies

These capabilities enable advanced models such as:

• automated certification of renewable energy
• tokenisation of energy surpluses (ZEAC, EKW)
• privacy-preserving AI-based optimisation
• data orchestration across multiple domains (energy, mobility, climate, buildings)

Interoperability and Semantics

Empower-X integrates semantic services to guarantee interoperability across energy, mobility and urban systems, aligned with:

• Common European Energy Data Space (CEEDS)
• IDSA / DSSC Blueprint
• Gaia-X
• OneNet, BD4NRG, Enershare
• SAREF, NGSI-LD, Smart Data Models

The Empower-X semantic model includes:

• format normalisation (JSON-LD, CSV, XML, NGSI-LD)
• energy, mobility and urban ontologies and vocabularies
• federated catalogues with FAIR metadata
• automatic validation of usage contracts and semantic compatibility
• mapping across municipal, energy, geospatial and e-mobility systems

This model supports seamless integration of:

• smart meters
• photovoltaics, batteries and DERs
• charging stations and shared-mobility systems
• public and industrial buildings
• environmental and climate sensors
• urban digital twins

Data Economy and Incentive Mechanisms

Empower-X implements a data-economy framework for energy data through the mechanisms of the Ocean Enterprise Collective.
Capabilities include:

• publication of energy, mobility and urban datasets as tokenised assets
• provision of computational services (forecasting, optimisation, simulation) under smart contracts
• automatic compensation between data producers and consumers
• incentive models for energy communities, municipalities and service operators
• mechanisms for sharing value generated through analytics, prediction or energy certification

The DLT infrastructure maintains an auditable trace of:

• data accesses and data transfers
• active permissions
• algorithm executions on sensitive data
• energy transactions and green certifications
• service usage and monetisation

Resource Availability

Empower-X hosts:

• Proprietary resources shared under controlled usage policies (electricity consumption, Energy Community data, mobility data, urban-climate data, building data)
• Advanced computational services:
  • energy optimisation
  • generation/demand forecasting
  • flexibility modelling
  • electric-mobility analytics
  • digital-twin simulations
• High-value open datasets:
  • climate and satellite data
  • irradiance and PV-potential maps
  • building inventories and urban typologies
  • air-quality, traffic and emissions data

All resources adhere to FAIR principles and include technical, semantic and governance metadata ensuring:

• discoverability
• interoperability
• auditability
• reusability across multiple services and cities