The sea change in the Electric Power industry is posing many new challenges to green software engineering. The disruptive developments in smart grid distributed energy generation and distribution, the rapid growth and viability of renewable energies, the rise of “energy communities”, the proliferation of demand response-enabled smart appliances/ devices and the threat from new battery technologies (e.g. graphene) all contribute to force energy utilities out of their “natural monopoly” status. The future of utilities is now seen to be in Transactive Energy: market-based transaction-oriented exchanges between energy producers, prosumer and consumers, with economic and control mechanisms that allow the dynamic balance of supply and demand across the entire electrical infrastructure using value as a key operational parameter. Existing utility control systems are not able to manage the physical infrastructure being added to the grid (e.g., solar panels, wind turbines, customer-owned microgrid systems, smart devices, etc.), let alone dictate realtime market exchanges. To survive, the utilities must change their business models and rethink their role in the value proposition, moving from an electricity supplier (i.e., a goods-dominant perspective) to a smart service provider in the new Transactive Energy ecosystem (i.e., a service-dominant perspective). This talk will provide a state of the art overview of the challenges, paradigm shifts required, and future directions for engineering for Transitive Energy systems. A promising Eco-architecture approach will be discussed based on an empirical case study with a large IT service consulting firm.

The GREENS workshop series brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss both the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in green software, including novel ideas, research challenges, methods, experiences, and tools to support the engineering of sustainable and energy efficient software systems.