Matter Just Learned to Talk to the Grid. KNX Has Been Doing It for Years.
Matter 1.6 became the latest released spec on 22 June this year, and a good chunk of the development effort behind recent versions has gone into one thing: getting Matter devices to talk to the electricity grid, not just to each other. It's a genuinely useful step for that ecosystem. It's also a feature wired systems have had for years, and it's worth explaining why the gap still matters.
What Matter actually added
The Device Energy Management cluster arrived with the Matter 1.3 specification, alongside new Electrical Power and Electrical Energy measurement clusters. Together they let a compatible appliance report real-time power draw and a short-term power forecast, and let a home energy management system ask it to shift its start time, pause, or throttle. Later versions extend that to more device types: heat pumps, solar, batteries, water heaters.
On paper, that's a smart plug going from "on or off" to "here's what I'm using right now, and here's what I could do about it." Solid progress for a consumer ecosystem that started out as a lighting and locks standard.
Where it still needs the internet
Day to day optimisation, like timing a washing machine around your own solar production, can happen entirely on your local hub. But actually responding to a utility price or demand signal is a different story. The Connectivity Standards Alliance, which runs Matter, has a formal liaison agreement with the OpenADR Alliance specifically to bridge Matter's in-home layer to utility-side demand response. That means a cloud-connected controller, an aggregator or demand-response service provider, and OpenADR itself, all sitting between your appliance and the actual price signal from the grid.
The engineering itself is sound, and cloud coordination makes sense for a global consumer standard that has to plug into wildly different utility programmes in different countries. But it also means the "grid-aware home" is still, structurally, a cloud service with a local device on the end of it.
What KNX has quietly been doing the whole time
This is the part that doesn't get a press release, because it isn't new. A KNX installation ties switching actuators for big loads (geyser, pool pump, HVAC) directly to real-time data from the inverter, over Modbus or a similar open protocol, on the local bus. The system decides whether to draw from solar, battery, or grid, and adjusts load timing accordingly, without a round trip to any cloud service. 1Home bridges that into Home Assistant or Apple Home if you want a dashboard, but the dashboard is a convenience layer, not the thing making the decision.
KNX never had to bolt "energy smart appliance" support onto an existing spec, because power monitoring and load control were never split from the rest of the system in the first place. It's been part of the same bus, using the same datapoint types, since before "Matter" existed as a name.
Why the gap matters more here than most places
South Africa doesn't have anything resembling the OpenADR-style demand response infrastructure that Matter's grid features are built to plug into. As far as I'm aware, no local utility runs a programme like that yet. So the part of Matter's 2026 roadmap that's genuinely new, cloud-coordinated grid signalling, has nowhere to connect to here regardless of which ecosystem you buy into.
What actually moves the needle locally is exactly what KNX has always done well: local, deterministic control that shifts load away from peak tariff periods and prioritises your own solar and battery, with no dependency on an overseas utility programme ever arriving. It's the same architecture KNX installers have been building for years, and it's still ahead of what Matter can do without a cloud connection.
Where this leaves you
If you're speccing a new build or a renovation, the question isn't whether your appliances can technically report their power draw. Plenty of consumer gear can do that now. The question is whether the thing making the decision lives on your property or somewhere on the internet you don't control. For anything tied to your geyser, pool pump, or HVAC, I'd want that decision local, every time.
If you're planning a project and want it built that way from the start, get in touch. Just a conversation about what the project needs.
Wayne | KNX Logic wayne@knxlogic.co.za | 082 564 3982 | www.knxlogic.co.za
Comments