Rethinking Energy Data Management: Trends and Challenges in Today's Transforming Markets

The energy market domain is subject to a continuous transformation process, mostly driven by governmental regulations. To efficiently handle the large amounts of data and the communication processes between market participants, specialized database applications have been developed. In this paper, we present the energy data management system (EDMS) as a standard software solution, describing its core components and typical system integration aspects. However, current market topics like smart metering, energy saving, forecasting for renewable energy sources, mobile consumption and smart grids lead to new database challenges. We provide an overview of these trends and discuss their impact on existing information systems, focusing on the technical challenges of data integration, data storage, data analytics and scalability. As energy data management has to match those new requirements, promising research opportunities are offered to the database community.