Turning a data standard into something any manufacturer can use
A standard is only as good as the data people can put into it.
For the EMerge Alliance, we turned a complex data standard into a guided form any manufacturer can fill in — no code, no spec to decipher, clean data in minutes. It's a small tool doing a big job: unblocking the shift to a new kind of power grid.
The story starts, improbably, in the 1880s.
The world is catching up to DC
In the 1880s, Thomas Edison's direct current (DC) lost a famous fight to alternating current (AC). AC could travel long distances and change voltage along the way; DC couldn't. So the world wired itself for AC, and stayed that way for over a century.
But the conditions that made AC the obvious choice are falling away. Almost everything we plug in today — solar panels, batteries, LED lights, EV chargers, the device you're reading this on — actually runs on DC, and on an AC grid each one wastes energy converting back and forth. So a new kind of system is emerging: the DC microgrid, a local, resilient setup that keeps power as DC from the solar panel straight to the socket. It's a cleaner, more efficient way to power a building — and EMerge Alliance, a non-profit industry group, writes the standards meant to take it mainstream.
The challenge of making it real
A microgrid is assembled from parts — batteries, converters, breakers — made by dozens of different manufacturers. To combine them, you need to know how each one behaves, in a form you can compare. But every manufacturer describes their products differently, buried in PDFs that don't line up. Comparing two products, or checking whether they'll work together, has meant reconciling mismatched data by hand — friction that slows a microgrid down before it's even designed.
EMerge's Interoperability Data Model is the answer: one shared, machine-readable format for describing this equipment, so any design tool can read it. But a standard only helps if the data actually exists in that format — and that data has to come from manufacturers. Asking them to hand-write technical files against a specification was never going to happen at scale. The standard was ready; the data wasn't.
What we built
Empathy Works built the missing piece: a system that makes the standard itself the thing manufacturers fill in. It works in four movements.
Define
The Interoperability Data Model became the foundation of the tool — every field, requirement, and rule in the standard became structure in the form. EMerge owns the standard; the tool follows it exactly.
Submit
A manufacturer fills in a clear, guided form — the right input for every field, helpful prompts where people get stuck, and no spec-reading required. Where the information already lives in an existing document or product page, it can be pre-filled for review rather than re-typed.
Review
Submissions arrive already validated against the standard — checked field by field before a person ever sees them, so no one is reconciling mismatched files by hand.
Publish
Every product entered comes back out two ways at once: machine-readable data any design tool can consume, and a clean spec sheet that's readable at a glance. Entered once, usable everywhere.
No code. No deciphering a spec. What once needed an engineer now takes anyone a few minutes — and what comes out is clean, standardized data that's correct by construction.
What it unlocks
Now the data exists — and that changes everything built on top of it. Engineers can search and compare equipment in seconds instead of days. They can lay out an entire microgrid on screen and simulate exactly how it will perform — every battery, converter, and load working together — before ordering a single part. That kind of simulation is genuinely powerful, and it only works because every component speaks the same language; feed it mismatched PDFs and it has nothing to run on. That same structured data is also ready for the AI tools that increasingly work with data directly rather than reading documents. And every product a manufacturer adds makes the whole ecosystem more useful — and the shift to DC power a little faster.
The hard part was never defining the standard. It was getting the world to fill it in — and now that's the easy part.