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.
Industry: Energy
Also in the data model catalog
This standard shows up on both sides of the house — as a standard applied in API operations here, and as a data model defining what information exists. Same standard, two lenses.
See it as a data model →