Virtual Energy System: Data Sharing Infrastructure pilot progress to improve energy system efficiency and resilience

Virtual Energy System: Data Sharing Infrastructure pilot progress to improve energy system efficiency and resilience

Earlier this year, we were appointed by Ofgem as the Interim Data Sharing Infrastructure (DSI) Coordinator, a critical role in delivering a digitalised, secure, and efficient energy system. Since this appointment, we’ve launched the Virtual Energy System: Data Sharing Infrastructure Pilot to explore how DSI capabilities can facilitate scalable data sharing. This initiative aims to improve operability and resilience, lower carbon emissions, and reduce costs to consumers.

What is the Virtual Energy System: Data Sharing Infrastructure Pilot?

Digitalisation and data sharing are essential for achieving net zero. This pilot, developed with expertise from NESO, project partners, and the National Digital Twin Programme, and supported by Ofgem, established initial DSI capabilities. It showed its potential through an outage planning use case scenario, marking a significant step towards the broader goal of the Virtual Energy System (VirtualES).

What did the pilot achieve?

The DSI Pilot successfully met its goals, meaning it can now move into the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) phase. The design and development phase provided a proof of concept (PoC) for the DSI, allowing comprehensive testing with network partners. This PoC offered critical insights for the DSI’s conceptual model, helping to mitigate future risks. The results will guide future development, focusing on scaling up the number of participating organisations and the variety of data products. Additionally, the pilot provided valuable insights into the social aspects of implementing the DSI, including legal, skills, capabilities, and regulatory requirements.

What are the benefits?

By collaborating with network partners, the DSI Pilot gathered valuable user feedback. This information will help understand needs and prioritise feature development in future phases. The pilot offered insights into different implementation models to maximise adoption, tailored to each organisation’s preferences and capabilities. The DSI Pilot solution provided insights into future requirements for scalable, secure, and reliable data sharing. The pilot and its use cases could bring significant benefits to the energy system, including improved operability and resilience, lower carbon emissions, and reduce costs to consumers.

Innovation at NESO 

Recently we published our Innovation Annual Summary. In the summary, you can look back at what we have achieved over the last year in the innovation space and explore case studies of our standout projects. 

Read here