Elia Group supports energy sector transformation and data centricity through data marketplace

As a major player in the European ecosystem, Elia produces 50 million data points every day. We are committed to driving decarbonization and meeting the European Union’s digital ambitions around opening and sharing data for the public good, looking to become data centric by treating data as a corporate asset and providing it to our multiple stakeholders in tailored ways.

After listening to feedback from stakeholders, who include electricity market participants, regulators, authorities, energy service companies, individuals and data service providers, we knew that our data platform needed to meet four key requirements:

• Accessible and usable by all

• Open by default, with users clear what they could legally use it for

• Comparable and interoperable, for example using consistent units of measurement

• Trustworthy and high quality

After reviewing the market, Elia chose to work with Huwise as its data marketplace platform provided the best match for our challenging requirements. After a nine month development period, the OpenDataElia portal was launched in July 2021.

Available in English, French and Dutch, datasets span seven key areas – balancing of electricity production against consumption, transmission, power generation, congestion management, load, adequacy and internal studies/research. There is a rich diversity in the types of available data. Some is produced on a near real-time basis, while other datasets are only updated four times per year. Publication frequency also varies, depending on user need and the speed at which data can be collected and processed through Elia’s data architecture.

As part of our shift to becoming data centric, open data is just part of Elia’s broader data platform, which covers processing, repositories, analytics, data management, data services and integration with internal and external services. Aligning the open data portal with these capabilities is critical to success, particularly around data governance and lineage.

Overall, this major project is transforming how we handle and use data across the organization, enabling the company to become more data-driven and efficient. Key to achieving these aims is empowering business users and delivering compelling data experiences to the right audiences.

We are therefore automating the publication of data flows, with new events captured, transformed and automatically published on the open data portal, following data governance rules. This removes any obstacles to data publication, saving the IT team time and enabling business people to share data more easily.

Since it was introduced our data portal has been constantly improved and developed, with new datasets being regularly added, particularly in response to user requests.

After a thorough technical evaluation, we selected the Huwise platform as it delivered the strong functionality and flexibility we required for effective open data sharing.

Successfully harnessing open data as part of our wider data-centricity strategy has unlocked major business, technical and ecosystem advantages for Elia. Key benefits achieved so far include:

Increasing data usage across our ecosystem

Previously external stakeholders found it difficult to find, understand, or use the open data we provided as it was inconsistent, not always updated and hard to locate. Our new data portal has solved these challenges and dramatically increased usage. Currently, there are 49,000 monthly users visiting the portal on average and over 26 million API calls. Usage is growing at 10% every month. We are benefiting from the reliability of the Huwise platform, which scales seamlessly to meet our fast-growing needs.

Using Data To Engage Stakeholders In New Ways

Not only do users benefit from access to consistent, understandable datasets and a multilingual portal but data is available through compelling data visualizations, such as maps and graphics as well as via APIs. For example, by bringing together multiple datasets from different departments we have created a data visualization that clearly shows the current physical flows of electricity across the Belgian high-voltage grid. Through clear color-coding it shows exactly which lines are operating at close to capacity, helping explain to the public why certain parts of the grid require upgrading.

Effective Data Governance

By taking a holistic view that integrates open data within our wider platform, we have been able to create an effective data governance strategy across all of our data, including the current 96 open datasets it offers. Strong governance enables better control over data and thus increases confidence and trustworthiness amongst users. Importantly, governance combines both business and technical users involved in the creation of datasets, creating a holistic approach. This provides the foundations for Elia to become a more data-driven organization, where data is treated as a corporate asset.