Open Energy

Open Energy has the potential to both transform the energy industry and address the climate crisis via economic innovation, accelerating decarbonisation. Our project will develop an open standard for data sharing in the energy sector. On implementation it will enable energy network and market stakeholders to share data robustly, legally and securely, driving the use and adoption of innovation across the energy sector.

Following the UK's world-first work on Open Banking (which was co-chaired by Gavin Starks, Icebreaker One’s founder), we will develop a standard for sharing data that will enable UK energy network stakeholders to optimize the use of network assets, better price existing energy products and create new offerings, driving both private and public good. Open Energy is convening the relevant stakeholders across the energy industry, policy, science and asset owners to define an open standard for catalysing data access across the energy sector.

A transparent, open marketplace built around the needs of both the market and our climate reality will enable energy companies to invest in measurably low-carbon products and services.

The primary challenges are culture and business models. Organisations are based on legacy models that hold data ‘closed’ (negotiating access and uses on a case-by-case basis) instead of taking ‘shared’ or ‘open’ approaches (using pre-emptive licensing and web-based systems). High transaction costs (in time, process and money) are stopping the energy sector from working with data at scale. Lack of information transparency provokes an overly cautious approach in stakeholders, constraining creativity in finding new models, products and market solutions.

Data is not discoverable, clearly licensed for use, nor in formats that people or machines can easily manipulate. Open Energy will create the conditions to allow the energy sector and wider ecosystem to use data at scale, creating the standard to address the foundational ‘data plumbing’ to enable businesses to innovate and the UK to plan policies and regulation to protect its citizens, their environment and economy, and accelerate the path to decarbonisation.

Open Energy will repurpose the approaches used in Open Banking to the energy sector and demonstrate the concept viability in practice, with an initial use case implementing the approaches on solar electricity generation and asset meta-data. The Open Energy team has experience in collecting solar data and working with the physical assets, which we will bring to bear on this growing distributed energy resource data set.