UK Power Networks supports energy transition through innovative open data marketplace and community

Due to the energy transition to achieve Net Zero targets our business model is changing fundamentally, moving from a linear approach of transmitting power to customers to a much more active, distributed model.

Data sharing is essential to managing this complex ecosystem, to ensure resilience, enable innovation and strengthen relationships with our stakeholders.

To successfully achieve this shift and ensure resilience across our distribution network requires greater visibility, control, and
collaboration.

Data is central to this and while new UK regulatory guidelines on open data did not come into force until 2023, UKPN wanted to be proactive and lead the industry. As part of our digitization and modernization strategy, we therefore looked to create an open data marketplace for our stakeholders.

UKPN had multiple key objectives for its open data marketplace. It had to provide direct, easy access to a broad range of datasets for its diverse stakeholder community, which includes internal users, local government, businesses, consumers and the energy industry. Datasets include a variety of information on network assets as well as predicted future energy usage scenarios.

Now live, the marketplace helps UKPN to:

• Increase the usability and interoperability of our data.
• Ensure that data sharing and reuse meets security and privacy standards.
• Make data easy to use with an intuitive interface that gives choice in how data is accessed and consumed.

The marketplace is now central to a strong, open data community that shares use cases and promotes best practice in the use of open energy data. A recent demonstration of this engagement and feedback is a flexibility market use case enabled through direct, unsupported utilization of UKPN’s openly published data.

Data experiences on the marketplace are accessible as tables, maps, graphics or through downloads or APIs. This caters for all levels of data skills, democratizing information and making it available to all. For example, the Grid and Primary Substation dashboard brings together all relevant data on a specific site, including capacity, utilization and usage under future energy scenarios. It can be accessed in multiple ways, such as through its map, searches or drop down menu.

Key to the success of the project was closely involving stakeholders in the development of the platform, thus creating an active, ongoing open data community. We therefore ran a series of open forums to collect feedback and recruit people to help shape the beta platform, with the full portal going live in September 2021. More than 14,000 people have now used the marketplace, which has received over 4 million API calls.

We understood that it required a strong partner to deliver the right technology and expertise to achieve our aims. We therefore looked at organizations across Europe that were successfully sharing open data, and evaluated the technical capabilities of the platforms they were
using. Thanks to recommendations from existing clients, particularly in the energy industry, UKPN
chose Huwise as the best solution to meet our needs.

Working with Huwise enabled UKPN to launch the first iteration of our marketplace in just four months. It now offers 130 datasets, drawn from UKPN’s operational systems, with data integrated through the ODS SharePoint connector and an FTP server. UKPN uses three key ODS features in particular:

Bringing together and sharing our data has created a key resource for both UKPN and our wider community. The open data marketplace delivers full visibility of current network assets, where they are, what capacity they have and how they are being used. As part of this it includes details of nearly 1,000 large-scale connected generation sites, and over 2 million records.

This enables UKPN to optimize operations moving forward and meet changing energy needs, such as with electric vehicle charging. This not only helps consumers but those creating low carbon equipment moving forward, giving insight on where to locate projects.

Above all, UKPN has now created a vibrant, active community that is using open data to create a digital, collaborative, and low carbon future for the energy industry.