Smart city ecosystems provide fundamental resource services such as water
and electricity through an intelligent management system. Here, the authors
focus on energy resources for smart grids and smart buildings, investigating how
a smart grid infrastructure accesses the energy resources in a smart building
to obtain or control data. The energy service interface (ESI), which plays a
communication gateway role at the boundary of a customer building, hasn’t
received much study. The authors examine its design principles for enabling finegrained
access, implement and deploy an ESI prototype, and illustrate interactive
energy services between the grid infrastructure and smart buildings.