Since 1 May 2018, a team of researchers from TU Dresden and RWTH Aachen University has been involved in the National 5G Energy Hub project, together with various industrial partners and with the provincial capital of Dresden. Its goal is to make the 5G mobile phone technology usable both for communication between people and machines and between machine components. Through the communication between individual machine components, a 5G mobile standard is to be made available for energy technology applications, and specifically for building energy technology.

Instead of cable-based communication between energy suppliers and consumers, the measurement and control technology is to be connected to the wireless-based communication technology by means of cloud applications. This technological advance would permit the dovetailing of the local electricity supply with regional consumption. The decentralised and dynamic control of the energy supply, in turn, would favour the supply of volatile renewable energy sources through flexible load balancing.

In the three project phases, the basic hardware and software modules will initially be developed, followed by the creation of services, such as the digitisation of products and services. In the final stage, potential practical applications will be designed. The entire project is to be completed by 2028.