Europe is expanding a new energy system. Wind and solar capacity is growing faster than the fossil generation it’s replacing ever did, and smart meters, batteries and flexible assets are turning what used to be a one-way grid into something closer to a living network. Underneath that physical build-out sits a second, quieter one: the software stack that runs all of it. It’s being assembled choice by choice, contract by contract, and rarely treated as the strategic decision it actually is. It deserves more attention than it gets. The last energy system Europe built, the one running on oil and gas, left it with a dependency problem that took half a century to manage and a war on the continent to expose fully. Europe shouldn’t sleepwalk into the digital version of the same mistake.
It’s a familiar pattern. For decades, European energy security meant asking where the oil and gas came from and what would happen if that tap got turned off. Europe built strategic reserves, diversified suppliers, and eventually paid a steep price for the diversification it hadn’t managed to do. The new energy system runs on cloud platforms, data pipelines and increasingly AI models instead of pipelines and tankers, but a similar question applies: who actually controls the platforms Europe’s grids, billing systems, forecasting models and customer relationships are quietly coming to depend on? For most of the sector, the honest answer is a small number of mostly American hyperscalers and software vendors. This isn’t a knock on those companies – many build genuinely excellent products, and our own stack runs on several of them. It’s more an observation about concentration risk, and about what happens to an entire industry’s room to manoeuvre when everyone, independently, lands on the same convenient vendor choice for the same convenient reasons.
The good news: Europe is still early enough in this build-out to shape it deliberately, and doing so doesn’t require anything exotic or expensive. It comes down to open standards.
By that I mean something specific: data stored in open, non-proprietary formats instead of a vendor’s private one. Interfaces built on open protocols rather than closed APIs that only one supplier’s tools can talk to. Architectures made of interchangeable, best-of-breed components rather than a single monolithic suite that quietly becomes impossible to replace. This isn’t theoretical. Energy companies using open table formats such as Apache Iceberg for their core data can move workloads between cloud providers or compute engines without a multi-year migration project. Those running platforms on portable, open orchestration layers like Kubernetes aren’t tied to one cloud provider’s proprietary runtime. And companies building on open sector protocols – OpenADR for demand-response signalling is a good example – can swap out an underperforming component without renegotiating their entire technology relationship from a position of weakness. It sounds like an engineering detail. In reality, it’s the difference between having a genuine choice and being stuck in a contract you can no longer afford to leave.
Vendor lock-in rarely shows up as one bad decision. It builds up through dozens of individually reasonable ones: the proprietary format that saved three months of integration work, the platform-specific feature that solved this quarter’s problem, the all-in-one suite that was just easier to procure than assembling something modular yourself. Each choice makes sense on its own. Add them up over a few years, though, and a critical infrastructure operator can end up with no real alternative supplier and no negotiating leverage – unable to answer the question “what happens if this vendor changes its terms, its priorities, or its ownership?” It’s exactly the question Europe spent the last decade learning to ask about energy imports.
I don’t think the answer is to reject cloud platforms, foreign vendors or AI tooling – that would be unrealistic and self-defeating given the pace this sector needs to move at. In practice, that means treating data portability as a non-negotiable requirement in vendor contracts, not a nice-to-have clause you concede in negotiation. It also means designing architecture so no single component, however good it is today, ends up in a position where replacing it would be prohibitively expensive. That’s what designing for exit actually looks like: testing the migration path before you need it, rather than discovering mid-crisis that the exit clause in the contract was never technically usable. At bottom, it’s a resilience question too. A sector that can’t lose a single supplier without losing continuity of service isn’t resilient. And it means favouring open standards even when a proprietary alternative looks marginally faster to implement today, because the cost of that convenience tends to show up three years later, at the worst possible moment, in a renewal negotiation with no alternative left on the table.
There’s also a collective piece to this that no individual company can solve alone. When an entire sector converges on open data formats and open interfaces, it doesn’t just protect individual firms; it creates a genuine, liquid market of interchangeable suppliers – the only real long-term counterweight to concentration. That cuts both ways: it’s good news for the strong hyperscalers already leading this build-out too, since a bigger, more liquid market gives them more customers to win, not fewer, and rewards them for competing on service rather than on how hard they are to leave. Standards bodies, regulators and industry associations have a role here similar to the one they played in diversifying energy supply: setting shared expectations so openness becomes the default competitive baseline instead of a burden a company bears alone.
Europe is building an entirely new operational backbone for how energy is generated, balanced, traded and billed, and that backbone will run on software for the next decades. The energy transition is just as much a digital transformation as it is a physical one, and it deserves the same deliberate design effort. Get the turbines and batteries right while leaving the digital foundation to chance, and you end up with a grid that’s clean but brittle. Open standards are how we make sure that foundation gives the sector real strategic choice for decades to come, rather than a convenience we end up quietly regretting.
Sietse Bruinsma is Director of Technology at Vandebron, a Dutch sustainable energy supplier, where he leads platform and software engineering, data, information security and agile delivery.
