Data Best Practice guidance, and therefore presumed open data, has become a regulatory requirement through the RIIO2 price controls and will be implemented in ED2 from April 2023. However, the specific value to consumers, innovators, networks, and others has so far also been presumed.

The National Grid Electricity Distribution (NGED) Value of Data report is the culmination of a series of interviews Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) has conducted on behalf of NGED to begin to articulate the value of open data to a variety of stakeholders. Through this investigation we hoped to demonstrate specific value to companies utilising NGED’s open data, be it in time or resources saved, or indeed in value added to their products, services, research, or other work.

To do this Energy Systems Catapult conducted interviews over many weeks with stakeholders comprising broadly of the following groups: innovators, academics and industry. This was done in parallel with a survey.

Key findings:

• Interviewees and survey respondents were clear in their ask for higher resolution data. This should be half hourly or more granular where this is possible.
• Respondents asked that NGED make available the following datasets:
  • Last in, First out (LIFO)
  • Headroom for each substation at the highest possible granularity
  • Connections data
• The Connected Data Portal facilitated 893,650 downloads of datasets between January and August 2022, from 45,902 visitors.

We hope others build on the insight of this paper and continue to make data openly available as we make the transition to a Net Zero economy.