Studies have shown that our increased use of several types of connected devices and systems can decrease our overall energy use. To get a better understanding of this general concept, we need to understand the current landscape of the smart energy industry. Doing so requires studying all the major participants in the ecosystem. At the consumer level, the current marketplace is growing with smart devices. Energy efficiency however is not the main motivation behind the purchase of these devices. Ease of use, comfort and convenience motivates consumers to bring smart devices - some with a focus on energy savings, such as smart thermostats- into their homes. Implementation of energy savings falls into many use cases. The scope can apply to energy savings within a home that a consumer might seek, or expanded out and aggregated to savings in a smart community or city. Savings potential can be further implemented by government and industry partnerships. Smart cities are typically a collaboration between local residents, government and businesses. At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Energy started the Smart Energy Analytics campaign which encourages businesses to use smart energy management systems. The goal is to improve monitoring techniques and energy saving practices that increase participating buildings’ energy efficiency. As a voluntary program, last year ENERGY STAR launched its specification for smart home energy management systems, taking an occupancy-based approach and identifying baseline devices for qualification. For all of this to work effectively, devices and systems need the ability to communicate effectively and efficiently. Many current standards address some of the communication issues surrounding devices and systems. However, today, they are not harmonized, leading manufacturers, distributed energy resources, utilities, and others in the ecosystem to design to multiple standards. A review of applicable standards shows that multiple standards development organizations have published many standards for each industry. However, most of the standards work has been published independently among, utilities, energy aggregators, DERs, and device makers. The lack of interoperability among the application layers of the standard is abundant. Further harmonization is required in the future to have some base-level communication protocol and reduce the burden on manufacturers and increasing device implementation as we try to address the consumers’ number one issue: ease of use and interoperability.