IEEE 2030.5, also known as Smart Energy Profile 2.0, is the IP-based application protocol for communicating with distributed energy resources — rooftop solar inverters, batteries, EV chargers and controllable loads. It uses a RESTful resource model over HTTP with mutual TLS, and is usually deployed through a national or regional profile that constrains it: CSIP in California, and CSIP-AUS in Australia, which is how Australian networks control distributed solar exports.
IEEE 2030.5
IEEE 2030.5 is how a distribution network talks to the solar inverter on a customer’s roof. It is a RESTful resource model over HTTP secured with mutual TLS, covering DER capability, control, pricing, metering and demand response — and it is almost always deployed via a profile rather than raw, because the base standard is broad enough that two conformant implementations need not interoperate.
- Profiles are the real deployment unit - CSIP constrains it for California; CSIP-AUS, published as SA TS 5573, constrains it for Australia and is paired with AS/NZS 4777.2:2020 for inverter behaviour.
- Mutual TLS by default - device certificates, not API keys. Appropriate for a protocol that commands physical assets on the distribution network.
- Write-shaped - unlike most energy standards in this catalog, 2030.5 exists to change the state of equipment: curtail an inverter, cap an export, dispatch a battery.
- Live in Australian networks - Jemena implements CSIP-AUS profiling SEP2; Endeavour Energy runs it for DER, undocumented publicly; SA Power Networks names it in its own Flexible Exports reporting.
Why it belongs in this catalog
This is the standard behind Australia’s flexible-export regime — the mechanism that lets a network give a household a larger solar export allowance in exchange for the ability to curtail it when the grid needs it. It is consequential infrastructure that almost no developer ever sees, because it is deployed between utilities and equipment rather than published as a developer product.
It also sharpens a gap this research keeps finding. IEEE 2030.5 commands physical assets, and the energy quartet found idempotency at 8% in Australia and 0% in the United States. A protocol that curtails an inverter needs exactly the primitive the sector does not publish.
Recorded here from provider evidence in the API Evangelist catalog rather than from a published report — the implementations found were real but, in two of three cases, entirely undocumented publicly.
