Agenda
Vision Paper
What is DEG

The Digital Energy Grid Summit:
Building the Future of Energy

Event Schedule

Friday
28th November, 2025

Event Location

King's College
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom (map)

The Digital Energy Grid Summit: Building the Future of Energy

Across the world, energy systems are facing a common challenge: the physical grid is evolving faster than the digital architecture needed to coordinate it. Renewable generation is accelerating, distributed resources are multiplying, and millions of devices are emerging at the edge of the system. Yet in most markets, these assets remain disconnected, discoverability is limited, and interactions depend on bespoke, siloed integrations.

The result is the same: untapped flexibility, rising grid costs, growing curtailment, and a widening gap between policy ambition and system capability. The axis of transformation is shifting from generation to coordination — and the world is converging on the need for a shared, interoperable digital layer.

Why the UK — and why now?

The UK stands at a particularly pivotal moment. Through conversations with policymakers, system operators, retailers, innovators, and community energy actors, a clear picture emerges: the UK is building many of the ingredients of a more dynamic, decentralised energy future. These efforts are creating more interaction points across the grid, households, DERs, markets, and platforms.

But this also raises a critical question: How will all these components coordinate in a system that is becoming more distributed, dynamic, and data-driven each day; where interactions are increasingly granular, automated, and continuous?

This signals the need for a new intelligence-first architectural paradigm — one that accelerates this energy transition by making coordination a foundational capability, not a forgotten add-on.

A natural architectural shift is beginning to take shape.

The Digital Energy Grid (DEG) – a federated digital architecture designed to serve as an AI-native interoperable framework for future energy systems – is a promising architectural approach. Mirroring the flow of energy itself, DEG enables the seamless movement of data and value (including but not limited to capital) across the entire energy value chain, including households, devices, utilities, market operators, and platforms- without replacing the existing systems.

At the heart of this approach is a set of building blocks such as universal identity, machine readability, and verifiability, to create a composable, programmable, and portable digital infrastructure. Through specification-based interactions built on these elements, DEG establishes a coherent digital backbone for the energy ecosystem, supporting transparent, reliable, and adaptive coordination across participants and systems.

Why bring this conversation to the UK now?

Beckn Labs, in partnership with Networks for Humanity, King's College Entrepreneurship Lab, and Innovation Hub for Prosperity at Cambridge Judge Business School, is hosting the Digital Energy Grid Summit to bring together policymakers, system operators, retailers, innovators, investors, and community leaders from the UK to explore a central inquiry:

As the UK’s energy system evolves, what is the most effective way to bring a federated digital architecture into practice?

DEG is the architectural model we are putting forward. The focus of the conversation is its implementation: how a federated digital layer can align with the UK’s existing structures, support ongoing reforms, and complement the innovation already in motion.

The summit is designed as a working space to explore and co-create practical pathways for adoption, discussing how an architecture like DEG can interface with current systems, reduce coordination frictions, and enable more fluid interaction across the ecosystem. It is also an opportunity for policy makers to understand how to trigger and nudge the ecosystem to adopt and adapt to this interoperable layer.

We aim to co-design the next layer of the UK’s energy architecture together: to shape how this connective layer can take form in a system already moving toward greater decentralisation and digitalisation.

For project briefs, pitch slots, or working group participation, contact the organisers: bharath@becknprotocol.io and c.montes@jbs.cam.ac.uk.

What is DEG