Utility Week

38 | FEBRUARY 2022 | UTILITY WEEK Analysis Open data is key to energy's net zero transformation Icebreaker One's mission is to leverage lessons in standardisation and data-sharing from open banking to drive the energy sector towards net zero – and empower it to harness an explosion of green innovation. Stuart Stone talks to its CEO, Gavin Starks. L aunched "to make data work harder to help deliver net zero" in the words of CEO Gavin Starks, open data venture Icebreaker One set out to facilitate financial, engineering and environmental data-sharing between firms and therefore steer the next ra• of net-zero decisions in the energy sector – and eventually beyond. Starks founded Icebreaker One having co- chaired the development of the transforma- tive open banking standard, set up the Open Data Institute with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and run a company – backed to the tune of £12 million in venture capital – aggregating different methods of carbon footprinting. In just over 18 months, the vessel for energy data change has made unexpected progress – "we're two years ahead of where I thought we'd be", Starks tells Utility Week Innovate. Hot off the Green Zone at COP26 – where Lord Maude of Horsham compared the importance of Icebreaker One's national data infrastructure to that of roads, rail, water and broadband networks – and steered by the likes of the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Innovate UK, the project continues to plot a course towards energy data standardisation. "If you don't end up with market cohe- sion, that probably leads us into a path where we don't deliver our net-zero targets," Starks says. What's more, Starks explains that there has been an unforeseen international con- text for Icebreaker One, largely through its role in Mission Innovation – a global ini- tiative to "catalyse action and investment in research, development and demonstration to make clean energy affordable, attractive and accessible". The group, co-led by Italy, China and the UK and comprising 22 countries and the European Commission, formed to help deliver the Paris Agreement and published a report at COP26. It counts Icebreaker One among its core mission members, along- side Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Energy, the National Grid and India's Department of Sci- ence and Technology. "China's doing the renewables, Italy's looking at flex markets, the UK's role is sys- tems integration, data, and digitalisation," Starks says. "We've taken open energy and dropped it right into the bucket. There's a real alignment. This didn't exist a year ago and we've been at the right place at the right time. "The goal of this is to demonstrate that by 2030, power systems in different geographies and climates are able to effectively integrate 100% of their renewable energies in the gen- eration mix. Data and interoperability is one of the pillars of work. The UK is leading it, and open energy is in the mix." Not a technology company However, Starks admits to being "a bit sur- prised" at the lack of search engine capabil- ity and data standardisation in UK energy at present. "Our view is there's some really baseline plumbing that we're doing where data discovery is a problem," he says. "If you were to ask, 'what's an inventory of all the energy data in the UK?' We don't know – nobody has been able to answer that question. Does a company even know how much data it's got at the moment? Probably not – and that's not specific to energy. "Every company has data that it probably shouldn't have or doesn't have data people think it should – and that's where we've established this access control layer," Starks explains. "Icebreaker One doesn't store any data. We store the metadata that describes the data and the permissions." At the heart of Icebreaker One's approach is to gradually increase the size of the UK's open energy data ecosystem to incorpo- rate firms that may want common access

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