The strategic impact of UK Power Network’s data product marketplace

Turning data into insight, innovation, and performance is vital for all organizations. Delivering high-quality reliable data at scale for humans and AI relies on high-value, highly-consumable data products, provided through an intuitive, centralized and self-service data product marketplace.

Leading electricity distributor UK Power Networks (UKPN) is at the forefront of using its data product marketplace to improve transparency, increase collaboration, and enable the creation of new services. Speaking at the Big Data London event, Matt Webb, UKPN’s CIO explained how the company is benefiting from data products and the wider impact its data product marketplace is having on the UK’s decarbonization goals.

UKPN is the UK’s largest electricity distribution network, delivering power to 8.3 million homes and businesses across London, the east and the southeast of England. It serves 19 million people, nearly 30% of Great Britain’s population, and its 190,000 kilometer network would roughly stretch half way to the moon.

It has been a pioneer in data sharing, driven by four key factors:

• Requirements to make data available, set out by regulator Ofgem
• The understanding that data sharing is essential to enabling the introduction of low carbon energy, thus achieving net zero and underpinning innovation
• Its societal responsibility to be transparent and open
• An understanding that sharing data more effectively increases efficiency for both itself and its wider ecosystem

UKPN was already sharing many data assets from different parts of the business publicly and with selected stakeholders. However, this ad hoc sharing was inefficient and lacked governance and oversight.

Working with Huwise (formerly Opendatasoft), it created and deployed an intuitive, centralized, self-service data product marketplace. Through close engagement with its wide range of stakeholders, UKPN has designed a marketplace experience that meets different stakeholder needs, from the most technical users (such as academics and developers looking to connect new generation assets), to those who are new to both data and the energy world, such as local authorities looking to accelerate their own decarbonization,

Implemented in just four months, the marketplace enables access to data in a variety of formats, including tables, maps, graphics or through downloads or APIs. This caters for all levels of data skills, democratizing information and making it available to all. Since its launch it has grown to now contain over 120 datasets, made up of 20GB of data with 14,000 registered users. Data ranges from near-real time sources with a 5 minute refresh to static information. The marketplace has seen over 17,000 downloads and 7 million API calls since it went live.

Given the size of its operations and the breadth of its community, UKPN needs to make data available at scale through its marketplace in ways that it can easily be discovered, accessed, and used by all.

Data products are therefore central to UKPN’s approach:

• Data products are a specific, high-value category of data asset that meets a defined, long-term business need and are easily consumable by a large potential user base.
• They are governed by data contracts which specify how data can be used and provide SLAs on its timeliness and speed of updating, as well as linking directly to source data to ensure trust and transparency.

Two of UKPN’s most successful data products are its Network Operational Data Dashboard and Network Infrastructure and Usage Map, both of which combine multiple datasets and allow users to drill down into the underlying information. Data is accessed through visualizations and dashboards, with an intuitive, interactive interface that can be used without requiring technical skills.

This substation dashboard data product includes:

• historical power flows,
• import and export capacity and headroom,
• near real-time data.
• information on the connections queue of new generating sources,
• broken down by Grid Supply Point (GSP), grid, primary and secondary substation.

This gives a complete view of the network at an overall and granular level, enabling better understanding of opportunities to add new capacity or usage across the UKPN region.

This product provides a geospatial visualization of all of UKPN’s network. It shows infrastructure including substation sites, overhead lines, towers and poles, as well as usage of the network, both now and in the future, with at a glance Red, Amber or Green icons around connection headroom.

This enables developers looking to site new renewable power sources to immediately see where there is capacity on the network through self-service. They can then begin initial engineering and feasibility studies for potential sites, without needing to contact UKPN until much later in the process. This both speeds up the connection process and increases efficiency for all, reducing the number of incoming information requests to UKPN.

Plans to share data more widely can face obstacles at a business, technical and resource level. However, as Matt Webb explained in his presentation, these can be overcome through a combination of analysis, the right partners, and a change of internal culture.

Sharing data can be seen as increasing risk, particularly in a regulated industry such as utilities. However, when analyzed in-depth, this risk is often not as substantial as first assumed. Much of UKPN’s data was already being shared in a piecemeal way, so was already public in some form. It is important to understand what the risks are to sharing specific data, and how they can be mitigated. UKPN runs a triage process on all new datasets, measuring risk and how it can be overcome, such as by anonymizing personally identifiable information.

Data takes time and resources to prepare and shape for use. That means it is important that effort is put into the right data that meets stakeholder needs, particularly when building data products. UKPN engages closely with stakeholders, understanding their pain points and which data can help. By co-creating with them it is able to prioritize the data products that will deliver greatest value.

The majority of users of UKPN’s data product marketplace are not data experts – and many, such as those in local authorities, are not energy experts either. That means your marketplace has to provide an intuitive interface that meets the needs of different stakeholder groups, as well as making data available in formats that can be easily consumed. Again, UKPN has worked closely with key users to build an experience that is simple and clear, with data visualizations, maps and dashboards provided alongside raw datasets.

Organizations have enormous (and growing) volumes of data. The more data assets added to a marketplace, the more difficult it can be for users to find the data that they are actually looking for and need. UKPN has overcome this potential pitfall by spending time on metadata standards and classification, and aiding discovery through Huwise’s AI-powered search functions.

Since its launch, UKPN’s marketplace has seen enormous growth in both usage and the amount of data it contains. Different stakeholder groups, from developers of new generation sources to local authorities, academics, UKPN employees and the general public are all benefiting through faster, more seamless access to the right data for their needs. Benefits span multiple areas:

By making data available to all stakeholders, UKPN is underpinning decarbonization, helping increase the connection of renewable power sources and enabling local authorities and EV charging companies to more accurately plan their strategies.

The data product marketplace ensures that UKPN meets its regulatory obligations around sharing data, but goes far beyond this. It helps build a culture of transparency and is driving collaboration across its wider ecosystem, as well as creating a positive reputation for UKPN in the sector.

As stakeholders can access data through self-service, the number of incoming requests to UKPN’s data team has fallen. Information is available instantly, helping stakeholders to plan more quickly, and focusing UKPN resources so that they are more effective and efficient.

As all data on the marketplace undergoes rigorous quality and accuracy checks, it provides reliable information that can be used inside as well as outside UKPN. Greater trust and confidence in data helps build a data-driven culture across UKPN’s ecosystem.

Good data is essential to effective, transformative AI. The data product marketplace provides this foundation, offering a reliable, rich data source that is regulated, controlled and understandable by AI through comprehensive, standardized metadata. UKPN has already introduced AI-powered search and automated AI insights and visualizations to its data product marketplace, while the Huwise platform includes an MCP server to enable connections to external services and AI agents.

The success of UKPN provides lessons for all organizations looking to increase data consumption, not just those in the energy sector. Learn more by watching Matt Webb’s Big Data London presentation.