As part of our collaboration with Utility Week and the Energy Geeks, the Utility Week Forum brought together Energy Geeks and leaders from across the energy system to discuss the need to embrace digitalisation.

The Geeks’ Manifesto for a Digital Future provided the starting point for a broad-ranging discussion. The roundtable gave participants the opportunity to hear first-hand challenges and gain a shared understanding of the pressures involved in delivering their responsibilities across the wider system.

Comment by Rich Hampshire, Vice President, Digital Utilities, CGI

There can be no doubt that, over the last decade, there has been significant progress in understanding what the digitalised GB energy system should look like. Indeed, some of these digital foundations are already well on the way to being established. But there’s still a lot to do over the coming few years if an ever more decentralised electricity system is to continue to deliver the levels of reliability we have come to expect.

Whilst it was initially contended that digitalisation is framed as a next decade issue, what became clear was that it is too often considered as a technology challenge. This was exemplified by the discussion on the interpretation of the Energy Digitalisation Taskforce’s recommendations on the need for a ‘digital spine’ alongside delivery of interoperability and public interest digital assets.

Laura Sandys, Chair of the Energy Digitalisation Taskforce, on the role of the “digital spine” as a framework to enable digitalisation

"The digital spine was never about technology, it’s about what is the thinnest layer possible that tells you who shares what, when and how. It’s the HTML of energy. And it is super important, because if you get to 2030, with 20 million assets on the system, and you haven’t got some form of digital overlay, then the problems we saw at Heathrow earlier this year are going to be happening every five minutes.”

Shifting the focus to consumer benefits

Whilst technology clearly has a vital role to play, not least in the generation and distribution of data, the focus moved to the timeliness, accessibility, understandability and interoperability of data. But, what stood out was one contributor’s comment on the purpose of sharing data, “what does the end customer need from this?”.  

Perhaps that clarity of focus on the consumer benefit could help shift the approach to data sharing from one of compliance with legal and regulatory frameworks, to one of value creation and fair attribution based on costs and risks.

Global lessons

This view was supported by examples from France and the telecoms sector, where that focus is on customer outcomes ahead of technology inputs, and from India where the focus is on the services to be enabled through data interoperability.

Outcome-led vision for digitalisation

The conclusion that digitalisation is about data, outcomes and value over technology is key. DESNZ and Ofgem have a genuine opportunity with their much-anticipated vision for digitalisation. A vision that draws on the experiences of other sectors and other territories, as well as more than 15 years of British utilities’ experience from innovation-funded programmes, can provide system actors with the clarity they need to align their business strategies to the vision – not just iterate their digitalisation strategies.

Read the full roundtable summary