In recent years, the European regulatory framework has clearly recognized the crucial role of aggregation in modernizing and democratizing energy markets. While regulations now officially grant many small producers, consumers, and prosumers the legal right to sell their flexibility, a question remains: do we have a digital infrastructure to support this transition?
Most facilities that could participate in flexibility markets, such as industrial plants, commercial buildings, and tertiary facilities, were never designed to communicate with the outside world as flexibility aggregation requires.
But there’s good news: they aren’t starting from scratch. Quite the opposite. They rely on a fragmented mix of technologies: Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) and metering devices from several decades, Building Management System (BMS) Platforms using incompatible protocols, proprietary vendor hardware, and control systems that function perfectly, but only within their own closed environments.
Often, it’s a mix of Modbus Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) devices communicating over serial lines, Open Platform Communications Data Access servers running on outdated Windows machines, and proprietary control and automation systems that were never meant to be opened to external systems. If data is reported, it often happens manually. However, in most cases, it’s not stored at all.
Simply put, legal rights mean little if your data is trapped in a 30-year-old controller.
Without a way to collect, aggregate, and align this heterogeneous data in real time, thousands of potential flexibility providers remain sidelined and are unable to participate in flexibility markets. What’s missing is the interoperable “connective tissue” that can turn thousands of diverse energy assets into a
unified, market-ready force.
The solution is not to rip and replace these legacy systems, but to unify them.
For some reason, most organizations instinctively look for a “new software solution,” a “data platform,” a “data lake,” or an “analytics tool.” Often in vain. They soon realize that the main challenge is not analysing data, but obtaining reliable, consistent, real-time data flow between the systems that were never designed to work together. Typical solutions suggest building custom adapters for each asset. In practice, developing and maintaining integrations in this way quickly becomes a nightmare.
This is where SCADA takes on its often-underestimated role, not solely as a monitoring system, but also as an integration layer and data bridge between otherwise disconnected worlds: legacy systems at a prosumer site and the digital infrastructure of the aggregator.
Why SCADA?
SCADA systems already include many of the capabilities needed to integrate heterogeneous industrial environments. They support dozens of industrial communication protocols, provide mechanisms for data normalization, ensure time synchronization, validate data quality, use a unified tag model, and enable reliable real-time communication with legacy controllers. In essence, SCADA has already become a universal translator between devices, even though it is still commonly perceived as just “an operator’s screen”.
When SCADA is viewed as an integration layer rather than only a monitoring tool, the architecture changes significantly. Instead of adapting the aggregator platform to communicate directly to each legacy system, all systems communicate with SCADA, which becomes a single, reliable source of structured data. In this role, SCADA takes over data aggregation, normalization, time alignment, and data quality labelling, and acts as a gateway, a central point for exporting data to aggregators’ IT systems. This approach drastically reduces the number of integrations required and increases overall system stability.
An additional and often overlooked advantage is data semantics. SCADA tags already contain hierarchy (plant, device, signal), carry meaning within the process context, and are linked to alarms and events. This provides enormous value for analytics and reporting, as data is no longer just a set of numbers but contextualized information.
STUNNED in Action: The Flexibility Gateway
The STUNNED project showcases the practical power of SCADA in real-world applications.
Partner Institute Mihajlo Pupin’s proprietary SCADA software (VIEW®) and hardware (ATLAS®; Figure 1) will be deployed to enable legacy industrial systems and tertiary facilities to communicate seamlessly with an aggregator’s orchestration platform.
Figure 1. Institute Mihajlo Pupin’s proprietary SCADA
The SCADA will incorporate not only an integration layer but also a control unit to enable flexible responses to aggregator requests and host a local energy management system (EMS) built on advanced optimization techniques. All within a single system named the Flexibility Gateway, Figure 2.
Figure 2. The Flexibility Gateway based on SCADA
Conclusion
Through the STUNNED project, we demonstrate that the future of energy depends on effectively connecting the systems of the past. Enabling prosumers to participate in flexibility markets does not require replacing legacy infrastructure. It requires properly connecting it.
To achieve this, we must stop overlooking SCADA’s true power.
SCADA is far more than an industrial-grade monitoring system. Modern SCADA architectures can aggregate data from thousands of dispersed assets, transforming a chaotic mix of legacy hardware into a unified digital infrastructure. Within STUNNED, we are turning “passive” facilities into active, revenue-generating participants in the energy transition, and SCADA is one of the key enablers of that transformation.
