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Introduction

Data Spaces for the Energy Sector and Smart Cities​

The urban energy ecosystem generates massive volumes of data from multiple sources —renewable generation, smart meters, electric mobility, IoT sensors, public buildings, charging networks, climatology, urban infrastructure and municipal platforms— distributed across a wide diversity of actors.
An energy data space enables this information to be integrated, shared and processed in a federated, secure and auditable environment, ensuring data sovereignty, semantic interoperability, transparent governance and reliable mechanisms for monetisation and reuse.

How the energy sector advances through a federated data space​

Interoperability across all ecosystem actors​

Standardised connectivity between municipalities, grid operators, energy communities, mobility platforms, flexibility aggregators, service companies, infrastructure manufacturers and public administrations.
It eliminates silos, incompatible formats and proprietary dependencies, enabling the sharing of critical data —consumption, generation, charging-point status, mobility patterns, grid congestion— under clear and auditable policies.

Privacy preserved through Compute-to-Data and secure Data Rooms​

Algorithms move to the data using Compute-to-Data, allowing advanced analytics, prediction and optimisation without exposing sensitive information such:

  • individual energy consumption,
  • personal mobility,
  • building data,
  • energy-community balances.

Data Rooms provide secure and auditable environments where the data always remains under the owner’s control, even during processing. They are essential for sensitive scenarios such as energy certification, flexibility demand, citizen data or simulations of critical infrastructure.

Verifiable and flexible business models​

Usage policies, smart contracts, pay-per-execution models, subscriptions and incentive mechanisms based on data sharing (e.g., renewable surpluses, available flexibility, infrastructure data).
A distributed ledger (DLT) ensures full traceability, automatic settlement and end-to-end auditability of every operation —from flexibility calculations to renewable-energy certification or surplus tokenisation (ZEAC).

Governance and granular control by design​

Empower-X enables:

  • Web3 verifiable identities,
  • revocable permissions,
  • access traceability,
  • automated compliance validation,
  • clear and auditable usage rules.

This provides precise control over who accesses, which data, under what conditions and for what purpose, strengthening trust, regulatory security and technological neutrality throughout the energy ecosystem.

Why now is the right moment​

European standardisation and certification (Gaia-X)​

Infrastructures based on the Gaia-X Trust Framework, IDS/EDC connectors and Verifiable Credentials reduce technical friction and enable institutional-grade trust in complex energy, urban and mobility data-exchange scenarios.

Decentralised markets and secure computation (Ocean Enterprise Collective)​

The Ocean Enterprise Collective enables:

  • interoperable Compute-to-Data,
  • verifiable Data Rooms,
  • secure execution without data transfer,
  • and automated monetisation through smart contracts.

Each energy or urban dataset can be published with explicit policies and fine-grained control over which algorithms are authorised to run.

Open ontologies and data models for the energy and urban sectors​

Standards such as SAREF, Smart Data Models, NGSI-LD, CIM, and the semantic models of the CEEDS Blueprint enable harmonisation of data from:

  • smart meters,
  • DERs (PV, batteries),
  • charging points,
  • climate and environmental sensors,
  • urban infrastructure,
  • municipal and e-mobility systems.

Transparency and auditability as new regulatory requirements​

Renewable-energy certification, carbon accounting, PEDs, mobility data, energy efficiency and Data Act requirements demand infrastructures capable of verifying data origin, usage and transformations end-to-end.
Empower-X meets these needs by providing verifiable traceability, decentralised governance and fine-grained access control.

Validation through real deployments​

The operational deployment in the Rubí PED Pilot demonstrates the value of the model:

  • integration of municipal solar production and charging stations,
  • verifiable digital identities for energy actors,
  • Data Rooms for secure processing of consumption data and certificates,
  • policy-based access control,
  • energy optimisation without moving data via Compute-to-Data,
  • tokenisation of photovoltaic surpluses with real-time traceability,
  • interoperability between municipal systems, energy platforms and electric mobility.