ContainER

Summary: impacts and findings

The ContainER feasibility study, like the other two projects funded under Phase 1 of the MEDA competition, confirmed the vital importance of wider energy data visibility and access across the sector.  It developed a plan for a data co-ordination platform that would help achieve this, but was not selected for further funding in the later stages of the competition.

Project aims and approach

Energy data is currently held in multiple silos across industry bodies, often as part of a code or regulatory requirement. Project ContainER proposed a data coordination platform that would enable industry participants to discover and access data that is mastered by the most suitable data owner.

The plan was based on the principle of integrating and coordinating datasets that already exist across the industry and using modern distributed system architectures to facilitate this.

The proposed system architecture design and prototype roadmap would aim to create scalable authentication and access protocols to increase data mobility across the industry. This would:

• facilitate the creation and adoption of modern data exchange standards and APIs
• improve data quality by ensuring parties access data mastered by the most suitable owners
• increase data visibility and provide secure access for data owners to share and distribute data.

Use cases would be implemented via a data service protocol,  which would define the data structures and sharing permissions for that use. A suitable governance model would provide certainty that regulatory and legal requirements are adhered to.

Partners

Chaddenwych Services Ltd t/a Electron

Dates

June 2020 to July 2020

Achievements and barriers

The key achievements and outcomes were:

• an understanding of where user needs are currently, and validation of the need for better public data search functions
• confirmation that ‘public’ data does not mean accessible data, and there is a need to enable accessibility
• validation of the need for private data integration as an extension of the current data ecosystem.

Through this project, Electron developed a strong understanding of the needs of energy data users and holders, which will allow the company to improve all of its services.

Note on competition progress:

The Modernising Energy Data Access competition had three phases:

Phase 1, Discovery – successful projects gained funding for a six-week feasibility study

Phase 2, Alpha – funding for a three-month prototype project, and

Phase 3, Beta – funding for six months to develop the solution

In order to arrive at the most promising solution to meet the aims of the competition, three projects were funded for Phase 1, reduced to two for Phase 2, and one for Phase 3.

The ContainER project completed Phase 1 but was not selected to progress further.