The chair of the government’s Energy Data Taskforce has outlined some of its initial findings while speaking at the Utility Week Live event in Birmingham last week.
Laura Sandys, who was recently appointed as a non-executive director of the Energy System Catapult, said the taskforce will recommend the launch of three new initiatives – a data catalogue, a single asset registration platform and a digital system plan.
Sandys said the data catalogue would reveal what information is already accessible to the energy industry, its quality and where there are gaps. “In many ways, it’s taking the lid off all those lovely silos that we’ve got sitting around the system,” she explained.
The single asset registration platform, meanwhile, would prevent data about new energy assets from being fed into those a silos and bring together the ten existing registration initiatives which the taskforce has identified.
Sandys said the measures would help restore sight to the energy industry which has found itself living in a “blind man’s bluff world”. She noted that around one tenth of all generation capacity in Great Britain is effectively invisible to the electricity system operator – only showing up as a reduction in demand.
The former MP said the taskforce will publish its draft recommendations shortly.