Guest blog by Dr Emily Judson, University of Exeter. 

Digitalisation is often painted as a gargantuan force set to wash through sectors, organisations, and governments alike with the power of a spring tide. This viewpoint does not infer that digitalisation is an inherently negative trend. Rather, it signals a view that digitalisation holds a form of independent momentum and opaqueness that evades steering or influence.

Such a viewpoint is one that my PhD research – Governing the GB digital energy revolution for net zero by 2050 – fundamentally challenges.

My research shows that active development of governance for data and digital systems is vital in the era of accelerating climate change. Sectors across the national economy – and indeed internationally – increasingly look to data and digitalisation to support their Net Zero transitions. The potential for synergies between data, digital technologies, and decarbonisation is well documented. However, the road to achieving these relationships remains bumpy.

In the energy sector, policy, regulation, and strategy developments now routinely position digitalisation as both an essential and somewhat automatic enabler of decarbonisation that will underpin the sector’s transition to Net Zero by 2050. Much of this work is welcome, elevating the potential of digitalisation to support positive environmental action and providing direction-setting for future digital energy infrastructures, rules, and markets. Increasingly, policy and legislative development also prioritises digital interoperability across different sectors and spatial scales, empowering environmental, social, and economic value creation in newly linked spaces.

In parallel however, my research identifies a growing risk. The set of positive industry narratives and assumptions about the impacts of digitalisation on energy systems has not yet had associated monitoring, accountability, and governance put in place to tie these efforts into the achievement of climate goals.

The risk of this governance gap also has social and political consequences. My research provides evidence that good governance is necessary to build legitimacy and trust in energy system digitalisation. These factors heavily influence the shape, pace, and longevity of changes that we seek to achieve in a digitally facilitated transition to Net Zero. They are important to industry, wider society, and government alike.

There are many different avenues to tackling this governance gap, some of which are already under exploration by government, industry, and organisations like the Energy Systems Catapult. My research generates a further three recommendations for improving governance at the system level in support of a digitally facilitated Net Zero transition.

Recommendation 1: DESNZ and Ofgem should jointly invest in and implement the creation of a transparent methodology to assess and monitor system-level outcomes of digitalisation. The implementing/monitoring body should be an independent entity equipped with appropriate powers to request information needed to meet its mandate. The entity must also have robust data governance procedures to promote trust.

Recommendation 2: Sector accountability structures should be updated to ensure that monitoring information is acted on where necessary. Further research is required to determine a full program of change and associated responsibility, integrating with ongoing developments concerning digital delivery and regulation (e.g. interactions with a future Digitalisation Orchestrator and the National Energy System Operator should be assessed). As a starting point however, an obligation should be created for key sector governance bodies to respond publicly and within a set timescale (e.g. 90 days) to regular monitoring reports on the systemic outcomes of digitalisation.

Recommendation 3: Consistent approaches to open and shared data and digital resources must be developed. Ofgem should continue to enforce the consistent adoption of a set of common open data licences under the evolution of Data Best Practice guidance. In future, there would be benefits to providing consistent expectations for the open licencing of other digital resources, such as code. Ofgem and government must also jointly address the establishment of consistent, secure, and trusted mechanisms – policy, legal and technical – supporting appropriate sharing of non-open data and digital resources required to advance Net Zero use cases. This work should avoid approaches requiring the creation of centralised resource repositories and should instead focus on mechanisms supporting more effective and interoperable resource discovery, sharing, and licensing.

Further information on the findings of this research and justification of the three priority recommendations is openly published here. The author can be contacted via e.judson@exeter.ac.uk or via LinkedIn.