Join Richard McElhinney, Co-Executive Director of Project Haystack, and Patrick Coffey, Chief Technology Officer at LPA Energy Group, as they launch the very first episode of the Project Haystack Member Podcast Series.
In this inaugural episode, McElhinney introduces the podcast as a new platform designed to spotlight Project Haystack members—highlighting the innovative products and services they’ve built, how they apply Haystack technology in real-world solutions, the value it delivers to customers, and their perspectives on the future of the standard. The series will also explore what’s ahead for Haystack 5 and Xeto, and how these standards are shaping the next generation of data modeling.
Meet the Inaugural Guest: Patrick Coffey
The first guest is Patrick Coffey, CTO of LPA Energy Group in Australia. Coffey is one of the longest-serving members of the Project Haystack community and a longstanding supporter and contributor to its development. His experience spans decades of engineering, platform development, and large-scale deployments across energy and building systems.
Patrick Coffey, LPA Energy Group, and the WideSky Platform
Background
Coffey’s background is in electrical and software engineering. For the past decade, he has led the development of the WideSky platform. Earlier in his career, he worked in industrial automation during Australia’s mining boom, gaining deep experience with SCADA systems, PLCs, telemetry, and highly reliable field systems. He describes this phase as an early introduction to “big data”—albeit in a very different industry—where reliability and real-world performance were non-negotiable.
The Origin of WideSky
After moving from industrial automation into energy management solutions, Coffey and his team delivered projects for large Australian customers. They frequently found themselves extending off-the-shelf energy management software to meet real customer needs. Around 2014, the emergence of mature time-series databases and containerization technologies presented a new opportunity: to turn years of hard-won project intellectual property into a scalable, cloud-based platform. That vision became WideSky.
About LPA Energy Group
In 2020, the company that originally developed WideSky was acquired by LPA Energy Group. Founded as a lighting company, LPA has since evolved into a global energy solutions business with operations in Australia, the UK, and Hong Kong, and headquarters in Melbourne.
WideSky’s Mission and Customers
WideSky is designed to unify data from buildings, utilities, and devices into a single, usable platform. It addresses the challenge of siloed data spread across different systems, formats, and protocols by bringing everything together and structuring it using the Project Haystack ontology.
Customers use WideSky for dashboards, reporting, alarming, analytics, automation, and APIs. Common use cases include:
Portfolio-wide visibility
Demand management
Billing and cost analysis
Sustainability and ESG reporting
Integration with customer-owned systems
WideSky is deployed across Australia and the United States, serving large retailers, property developers, energy advisory firms, and organizations operating EV charging infrastructure.
Real-World Example: EV Charging at Scale
One WideSky customer is rolling out thousands of EV chargers across hundreds of sites in the United States. WideSky provides a unified view across all locations and uses real-time data to dynamically adjust charging behavior. This helps avoid costly peak demand charges when EV charging and building loads spike simultaneously. Crucially, the solution works across multiple charger vendors—eliminating the need for different tools or approaches based on hardware.
WideSky’s Involvement with Project Haystack
Early Adoption
Coffey’s team adopted Project Haystack early in WideSky’s development, around the transition from Haystack 2 to 3. Coming from a systems integration background, they immediately recognized Haystack’s value in eliminating wasted effort caused by inconsistent naming conventions and data models.
Implementation
WideSky includes a full in-house implementation of the Haystack standard, including the API and ontology. Haystack forms the backbone of the platform—driving data modeling, validation, and consistency across systems.
Contribution to the Community
Coffey and his team have also contributed back to Project Haystack’s open-source ecosystem. One example is Coffey’s contribution to an open specification aimed at building owners and consultants, now available on the Project Haystack website. He emphasizes that the standard advances most effectively when practitioners who use it daily participate in the conversation—even in small ways.
The Customer Perspective
While most WideSky customers don’t need to know they’re using Haystack, technical teams and integration partners benefit significantly from a clean, predictable, and well-structured data model when building on or integrating with the platform.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Haystack
Coffey highlights several strengths of Project Haystack, including its practicality and elegance. The ontology is approachable enough for professionals from many backgrounds—not just software engineers or data scientists. He also points to the strength of the community, where working groups bring together diverse perspectives to solve real, grounded problems.
Haystack 5 and Xeto
Coffey is a strong supporter of the direction Haystack 5 and Xeto are taking, particularly in two areas:
Templating: Defining templates once and confidently applying them across many sites dramatically reduces engineering effort, improves consistency, and removes unnecessary variation.
Model Validation: Xeto introduces a far more robust and standardized way to validate models, helping teams catch small errors early—before they turn into time-consuming issues.
Importantly, Coffey appreciates that Xeto maintains the clarity and simplicity that have always defined Haystack, keeping it practical and easy to understand.
Debbie Bretches Fri 19 Dec 2025
Join Richard McElhinney, Co-Executive Director of Project Haystack, and Patrick Coffey, Chief Technology Officer at LPA Energy Group, as they launch the very first episode of the Project Haystack Member Podcast Series.
In this inaugural episode, McElhinney introduces the podcast as a new platform designed to spotlight Project Haystack members—highlighting the innovative products and services they’ve built, how they apply Haystack technology in real-world solutions, the value it delivers to customers, and their perspectives on the future of the standard. The series will also explore what’s ahead for Haystack 5 and Xeto, and how these standards are shaping the next generation of data modeling.
Meet the Inaugural Guest: Patrick Coffey
The first guest is Patrick Coffey, CTO of LPA Energy Group in Australia. Coffey is one of the longest-serving members of the Project Haystack community and a longstanding supporter and contributor to its development. His experience spans decades of engineering, platform development, and large-scale deployments across energy and building systems.
Patrick Coffey, LPA Energy Group, and the WideSky Platform
Background
Coffey’s background is in electrical and software engineering. For the past decade, he has led the development of the WideSky platform. Earlier in his career, he worked in industrial automation during Australia’s mining boom, gaining deep experience with SCADA systems, PLCs, telemetry, and highly reliable field systems. He describes this phase as an early introduction to “big data”—albeit in a very different industry—where reliability and real-world performance were non-negotiable.
The Origin of WideSky
After moving from industrial automation into energy management solutions, Coffey and his team delivered projects for large Australian customers. They frequently found themselves extending off-the-shelf energy management software to meet real customer needs. Around 2014, the emergence of mature time-series databases and containerization technologies presented a new opportunity: to turn years of hard-won project intellectual property into a scalable, cloud-based platform. That vision became WideSky.
About LPA Energy Group
In 2020, the company that originally developed WideSky was acquired by LPA Energy Group. Founded as a lighting company, LPA has since evolved into a global energy solutions business with operations in Australia, the UK, and Hong Kong, and headquarters in Melbourne.
WideSky’s Mission and Customers
WideSky is designed to unify data from buildings, utilities, and devices into a single, usable platform. It addresses the challenge of siloed data spread across different systems, formats, and protocols by bringing everything together and structuring it using the Project Haystack ontology.
Customers use WideSky for dashboards, reporting, alarming, analytics, automation, and APIs. Common use cases include:
WideSky is deployed across Australia and the United States, serving large retailers, property developers, energy advisory firms, and organizations operating EV charging infrastructure.
Real-World Example: EV Charging at Scale
One WideSky customer is rolling out thousands of EV chargers across hundreds of sites in the United States. WideSky provides a unified view across all locations and uses real-time data to dynamically adjust charging behavior. This helps avoid costly peak demand charges when EV charging and building loads spike simultaneously. Crucially, the solution works across multiple charger vendors—eliminating the need for different tools or approaches based on hardware.
WideSky’s Involvement with Project Haystack
Early Adoption
Coffey’s team adopted Project Haystack early in WideSky’s development, around the transition from Haystack 2 to 3. Coming from a systems integration background, they immediately recognized Haystack’s value in eliminating wasted effort caused by inconsistent naming conventions and data models.
Implementation
WideSky includes a full in-house implementation of the Haystack standard, including the API and ontology. Haystack forms the backbone of the platform—driving data modeling, validation, and consistency across systems.
Contribution to the Community
Coffey and his team have also contributed back to Project Haystack’s open-source ecosystem. One example is Coffey’s contribution to an open specification aimed at building owners and consultants, now available on the Project Haystack website. He emphasizes that the standard advances most effectively when practitioners who use it daily participate in the conversation—even in small ways.
The Customer Perspective
While most WideSky customers don’t need to know they’re using Haystack, technical teams and integration partners benefit significantly from a clean, predictable, and well-structured data model when building on or integrating with the platform.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Haystack
Coffey highlights several strengths of Project Haystack, including its practicality and elegance. The ontology is approachable enough for professionals from many backgrounds—not just software engineers or data scientists. He also points to the strength of the community, where working groups bring together diverse perspectives to solve real, grounded problems.
Haystack 5 and Xeto
Coffey is a strong supporter of the direction Haystack 5 and Xeto are taking, particularly in two areas:
Templating: Defining templates once and confidently applying them across many sites dramatically reduces engineering effort, improves consistency, and removes unnecessary variation.
Model Validation: Xeto introduces a far more robust and standardized way to validate models, helping teams catch small errors early—before they turn into time-consuming issues.
Importantly, Coffey appreciates that Xeto maintains the clarity and simplicity that have always defined Haystack, keeping it practical and easy to understand.
Learn More
The next Haystack Connect conference is currently being planned for 2027—stay tuned for updates.