The energy sector will continue to lag behind on digitalisation until it stops seeing technology and infrastructure alone as the answer and starts to focus on the data itself.
The industry has instead been urged to learn from successful programmes and fledgling initiatives in other countries and sectors, including the ambitious Indian Energy Stack programme and France’s approach to smart metering.
These were among the conclusions of senior figures across networks, energy flexibility, regulation and policy convened by Utility Week as part of a new partnership with CGI and the Energy Geeks thinktank.
The debate was brought about to kick off a new series of articles, beginning in January 2026, which will build on the Energy Geeks’ Manifesto for a Digital Future. It will aim to both inform and then reflect on the government and Ofgem’s vision for digitalisation, due to be published in March 2026. The articles, which will build into a report for publication in May 2026, will delve into the distinct challenges of creating a digital infrastructure for the energy system, the benefits of doing so and practical steps to delivery.
This discussion, held in late 2025 under the Chatham House rule, was designed to gather views from a wide range of system actors.
It kicked off with the provocation that digitalisation is too often framed as a problem for the next decade and that this complacency could prove to be one of the biggest risks facing the energy transition.
Participants argued that a future energy system based on millions of connected assets will only function effectively with a robust digital foundation and that this needs immediate focus.
This warning is not new and was a central theme emerging from the work of the Energy Digitalisation Taskforce, chaired by the Energy Geeks’ Laura Sandys. Its 2022 report identified the need for a “digital spine” – a data architecture supported by a ‘data sharing fabric’. Roundtable participants expressed differing views on how far this vision has actually progressed in the past four years, with some arguing that it had “morphed into all sorts of other things”, partly because it was not clearly defined at the time. Others countered that the nascent data sharing infrastructure (DSI) model, which the National Energy System Operator has been charged with delivering, will achieve the same aims as a digital spine.
Sandys told the roundtable that the digital spine was “never about technology, it was about what I’d now refer to as the Highway Code”.
She continued: “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.”
Another participant stressed that innovation in energy will not come from inventing new technologies, but from adopting and using what already exists – provided the underlying data is coherent. Data, they said, does not respect organisational boundaries. If it is created at the wrong time, in the wrong format, or without coordination, it becomes meaningless once it crosses from one organisation to another.
The roundtable heard that common languages are therefore essential – not just between companies, but between machines and people. A director at an electricity distribution network said they needed a digital infrastructure to allow them to communicate more effectively with retailers but that the basis of this needed to be “what does the end customer need from this”.
However, they cautioned that the current approach of embedding data-sharing obligations into licences and codes is locking system actors into narrow, deterministic use cases – the opposite of what a flexible, data-driven system needs.
Lessons from abroad
Another contributor contrasted the debate in Great Britain with experiences overseas. In France, discussions with network operators tend to focus far more on customer impact than on the technology itself. They lamented that such a customer lens is often missing in Britain.
The discussion also drew heavily on lessons from India’s emerging “Energy Stack” initiative. This is an initiative led by the country’s Ministry of Power to create a unified, secure and interoperable digital public infrastructure for energy.
The roundtable heard that a key decision taken at the outset was to steer clear of “asset-first thinking”. Instead, the project focussed on services, narrowing the scope to a manageable number of interactions, split broadly into transactional (price discovery) and operational.
Rather than trying to anticipate every future use case, the Indian approach focused on interoperability - standardising data models and APIs so the system can evolve over time. This reflects a wider lesson from digital public infrastructure in areas like finance and identity – to break complexity into smaller building blocks, while ensuring they can be recombined as needs change.
Participants marvelled at the pace of the initiative, which aims to kick off a regulatory sandbox with utilities testing use cases in Q1 of 2026, with a “non-negotiable” deadline to deliver an end product by July ahead of a nationwide-rollout by the end of the year.
Other participants pointed to lessons the energy sector can learn closer to home, with telecoms having gone through a similar journey, which again was focussed first and foremost on customer outcomes.
So, where does GB go from here? There was an agreement at the roundtable that the architecture around the system must be backed up by strong governance to ensure all actors are operating in the interests of the system as a whole.
The Energy Geeks have stressed the need for a Modernisation & Digitalisation Unit (MDU) to be set up within government (but with cross-cutting functions across Ofgem and throughout the sector) to oversee the development of this digital infrastructure and ensure the resulting system actually works.
The approach DESNZ and Ofgem take with their “vision” later this year will be key. Participants called for this to provide clarity on the system of the future as well as clearly communicating the benefits of data sharing for the end consumer.
While progress to date may have been slower in Great Britain than in other countries, there was a recognition at the roundtable that digital sharing initiatives have at least forced the sector to confront integration for the first time, and that learning has its own intrinsic value.
But participants were clear on the central message - digitalisation is not about building another platform, it is about data, outcomes and value. Get the language right, align it to real-world benefits, and the technology will follow. Delay, and the energy transition will pay the price.
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.
Utility Week Forum provided the opportunity to bring together the Energy Geeks and leaders from across the energy system. The Geeks’ Manifesto for a Digital Future provided the starting point for a broad-ranging discussion. The roundtable enabled participants to hear first-hand the challenges from each-others’ perspectives and understand the pressures of ensuring that each can deliver on their respective responsibilities within the system as a whole.
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 delivery of interoperability and Public Interest Digital Assets.
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.
This view was supported by examples from France and the telecoms sector (and I would add the media), 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.
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.
