Elexon’s chief executive Peter Stanley outlines what the company, which manages the balancing and settlement code and will be market facilitator from the end of this year, is doing to digitalise Great Britain’s energy system.
The government has set an ambitious goal of achieving a clean power system by 2030. However, delivering on this requires more than scaling up renewable generation. It demands a fundamental transformation of our energy system—one that is underpinned by digitalisation.
Digitalisation sits at the heart of energy reform
In the coming years, millions of new smart devices, from electric vehicles to heat pumps and other technology, will connect to the networks. Both energy companies and consumers will demand better access to granular, real-time data to participate in markets. Policymakers have already begun to position the UK as a leader in energy digitalisation, and the government is progressing in the Data Use and Access Bill, aspects of which will apply what has been learned from the success of the open banking scheme to other sectors. For the energy sector, this includes using a smart data scheme allowing customers to more easily compare prices between energy providers.
Elexon is playing a pivotal role in digitalising GB’s energy system through major programmes such as half-hourly settlement and the development of asset registration for devices that are made available in flexibility markets. These developments will lay the foundation for a more flexible, efficient and resilient electricity system.
Digitalising the system
Elexon plays a vital role in ensuring the smooth operation of electricity markets, and designing and delivering key programmes and services that enable decarbonisation of the electricity system.
At the core of the clean power journey is Elexon’s delivery of half-hourly settlement, which will significantly accelerate the transition to a smarter electricity system. Half-hourly settlement will help the industry develop new products which reward consumers for being more flexible in how, and when they choose to use electricity.
Rather than relying on aggregated, or profiled consumption data, half-hourly settlement will enable Elexon to collect actual meter readings from consumers for every half-hour period of the day. Once half-hourly settlement is fully implemented in July 2027, in total we will be processing around 500 billion readings annually across GB.
We will make this data publicly available from 2027, through a smart meter data repository which will be part of our insights platform. The platorm provides data sets on the wholesale electricity market and is used by around 90,000 organisations for analysis, forecasting and market monitoring. We will ensure our provision of consumption data through the repository is in line with the emerging consumer consent framework, which Ofgem has been developing.
This new consumer consent solution will be delivered by a body chosen by Ofgem. It will allow consumers to share their consumption data with trusted third parties and it is planned to go live in 2026. We fully support the consent solution as it will protect consumers’ sensitive data and their privacy. Maintaining consumer trust in energy companies will be paramount over the coming years, as it is likely that they will offer consumers a wider range of products or services.
Supporting development of new flexibility tariffs, and asset registration
Half-hourly settlement will unlock high-quality, granular data, providing significantly more visibility of how people use energy. This data will enable a more flexible, dynamic system by providing a granular view of the market and more accurate forecasts of future energy demand.
From the end of 2025, Elexon will begin operations as the flexibility market facilitator. Alongside half-hourly settlement, this new role will play an essential part in creating a platform for scaling up flexibility provision to around 12GW by 2030. As the market facilitator, our role will be to align the local and national flexibility markets and develop rules so that these markets are more open, transparent and easier to navigate.
Ofgem has also appointed Elexon (as market facilitator) to establish flexibility market asset registration. We believe it is critical to tightly couple market rule making with the underlying data infrastructure that supports participation in these markets. Flexibility aggregators or asset owners currently have options to register their assets across more than 20 national and local flexibility markets. They face having to complete multiple registrations with different formats, processes and systems which is complex and time-consuming, increasing barriers to entry.
We are now working to deliver a solution which will be the ‘single source of the truth’ for details of all assets participating in multiple flexibility markets. The solution will be ready in 2027, a year earlier than originally planned, reflecting the urgency for this to be in place. The registration service will make it far easier for flexibility providers to co-ordinate the activity of assets in more than 20 flexibility markets.
Energy companies need to take advantage of these changes
There are now less than 60 months to go to 2030 and over that time there will need to be a five-fold increase in flexibility provision. Through delivering half-hourly settlement and a universal asset registration process, Elexon will provide data which can power innovation, and the solution for making potentially millions of assets more visible, so that they can more easily participate in flexibility markets.
Energy companies will need to take advantage of these changes to develop new products and services which reward and lock in changes in consumer behaviour.
