OpenADR is the open standard for automated demand response — the signals a grid operator or utility sends to shift, shed or shape electricity load at the customer’s premises. Version 2.0 is standardised as IEC/PAS 62746-10-1 and uses an XML message set over HTTP; version 3.0 and later are defined in OpenAPI, which makes the standard directly consumable by conventional tooling for the first time.
OpenADR
OpenADR is how the grid asks a building, a battery or a fleet of water heaters to use less power in the next hour. It defines a Virtual Top Node and Virtual End Node model, an event and reporting message set, and the security profile that carries them. The OpenADR Alliance publishes and certifies it.
- Standardised - OpenADR 2.0a and 2.0b are published as IEC/PAS 62746-10-1, giving the standard formal international status rather than trade-association status alone.
- OpenAPI from 3.0 onward - the newer revisions are defined in OpenAPI, a genuinely important shift: a demand-response standard that ordinary API tooling can generate clients for.
- Certified - the Alliance runs conformance certification, and certified products carry dated approvals that can be checked independently.
- Real production use - Voltus runs OpenADR 2.0a over mutual TLS; Blink Charging holds Alliance approval on its network; EnergyHub states OpenADR as the basis of its DER control API.
Where it sits in the agentic turn
Demand response is one of the few genuinely write-shaped surfaces in energy — an OpenADR event asks a physical asset to change state — and that makes it the place where the sector’s missing primitives bite hardest. The State of US Energy APIs found idempotency at 0 of 60 organizations across that market. A retried demand-response signal against a battery or a charger is not a harmless duplicate.
The scoring evidence points the same way as several other standards in this catalog: the OpenADR
Alliance scores 58.6 while the grid-tech-derms tier it serves averages 23.0, the lowest tier in the
US energy market. The body publishing the standard out-publishes the venture-backed vendors selling
software built on it — a pattern this research has now recorded in real estate, telecom and energy alike.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of US Energy APIs
The OpenADR Alliance scores 58.6 in a market where the utilities it serves average 29.8 — a standards body out-publishing the industry that needs it.
