Utility Week

22 | 30TH AUGUST - 5TH SEPTEMBER 2019 | UTILITY WEEK Operations & Assets Roundtable Haymarket Hotel, London, July 2019 I t's hard to pass a single day in the UK utilities sector today without being hit by some new and usually urgent message about the transformational potential of data for the sector. Customer and asset data, we are repeat- edly told, have the power to disrupt existing utility market structures, the competitive landscape and expectations of organisa- tional performance. Companies that successfully re-engineer themselves to allow dynamic data flows to drive their activities will reap rewards in cus- tomer acquisition and retention or regulatory outperformance, vendors promise. Further- more, they have the opportunity to carve out new, higher value roles for themselves in future markets. Most utilities have taken these arguments for investing in new data architectures and capabilities on board and have embarked on programmes to gain better visibility of organisational data, spread intelligence into "dumb" areas of their asset base and put in place analysis tools and talent to extract what is popularly termed "actionable insight" from data. The maturity and success record of these programmes is mixed across the sec- tor – though as Utility Week has previously observed, it is generically true to say that many utilities are struggling to push beyond "initiative-based" digital innovation. With this in mind, how realistic is it to hope that the sector could unite to share data across organisational boundaries and amplify the value of data sets for the good of customers, the UK economy and the environment? That question drove most of the discus- sion at a recent Utility Week event in London, hosted in association with Talend, including participation from data and technology lead- ers at a cross section of utilities. The debate was spurred by opening remarks from Richard Dobson, co-author of the recent Energy Data Taskforce report: A Strategy for a Modern, Digitalised Energy System. Dobson shared the report's recom- mendations – which were broadly welcomed by government and industry when they were issued in June this year – including an ambi- tion to adopt a "presumed open" principle for all energy system asset data. Putting the presumed open principle in place, Dobson proposed, would mark a move away from trying to get companies to release data for key trials and experiments and instead challenge companies to justify why they could not share data. The change in approach could facilitate innovation and accelerate the utility sector's response to grand challenges like the 2050 net zero emis- sions target. The response of event participants to this ambition was mixed, with a strong element at the table expressing concern and cau- tion about the many difficulties and risks they perceived to be involved. Many of these related to security and commercial interests, but there were also warnings about the prac- tical challenges to be overcome in terms of aligning taxonomy and data labelling across multiple systems in order to avoid perverse outcomes from data sharing. Then, too, two participants expressed worry about the response of regulators to any cross-sector open data initiative. One had scorched its fingers before by admitting data weaknesses in the interests of collective learning, only to be penalised for its honesty. Benefits of data democracy Notwithstanding these issues, there was a more enthusiastic grouping around the table Can utilities create a data democracy? Is the idea of presumed open data a bridge too far for utilities? Jane Gray reports on industry debate. Uniper's business-driven data science strategy Attendees at Utility Week and Talend's event also benefited from detailed insights into the journey Uniper has taken to transform the value of its data. Uniper – the generation and trading company that span out of Eon as part of a strategic reinvention process in 2016 – knows the value of real-time data to enable agile decision-making. "As a trading organisation, data has always been something we were very focused on," says Rene Griener, vice presi- dent data integration at Uniper. "But over the past ten years, the number of new play- ers and disruptors that have come into the market mean it now matters more than ever that we can price risk in the market correctly, and for this we need more information and to be able to act on it more quickly." To respond to this pressure, in 2017, Uniper embarked on a campaign to achieve total visibility and democratisation of organi- sational data, and to support its exploitation with a business needs-focused squadron of data scientists. The journey started with the creation of an organisation-wide data vision and a leap into the public cloud with the build of a central data lake – with support from Talend – using the popular data warehousing tech- nology Snowflake. A commitment was also made for the data science function to only work on data use cases that had sponsor- ship from a business decision-maker. "We wanted our focus to come from decision-makers," says Griener. "We knew that to make a real difference, our momen- tum had to come from those who felt the pain every day of not having the information they needed. "We also knew that those decision- makers are the ones who hold the most valuable and commercially important data. So it was essential to our mission to break down silos that we engaged them." At the start of 2018, Uniper's cloud architecture was ready and Griener sought out a business sponsor to volunteer a use case that could prove its potential. The use case looked at the burden placed on the business function to produce daily intelligence reports which compiled information from exchanges, brokers, weather stations and other data sources, and to use this information to run models to support effective trading. "The activity was taking up around 70

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