The Digital Infrastructure Behind Energy Data

Current Digital Infrastructure Position

The digital energy layer rests on five working parts. The Data Communications Company, the DCC, is the single licensed pipe between about 41 million smart meters and every authorised user of their data. The Data Sharing Infrastructure is a newer, shared network that lets grid companies, the system operator, suppliers and approved third parties exchange operational and planning data under common rules. The half-hourly settlement programme is moving every electricity meter point onto half-hourly settlement, with the changeover due in July 2027. The Smart Energy Code and the Retail Energy Code are the two multi-party rulebooks that hold the metering and switching machinery together. And a privacy and security framework sits over all of it to decide who may see what.

Two recent legal changes matter for the whole layer. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 19 June 2025, and most of its data-protection provisions came into force in early February 2026 through two commencement orders, so the legal basis for letting an approved third party read a consumer's energy data is now live across the United Kingdom.¹⁰¹⁸¹⁹ And the network's own asset records moved onto a shared, machine-readable model with the Long Term Development Statement Stage 2 publication of 29 May 2026, the first large GB instance of a regulator-set, validated data model and the pattern the rest of the layer is expected to follow.² The half-hourly settlement migration, meanwhile, began on 22 October 2025 and is working through its milestones toward the July 2027 changeover.¹¹

Each part has its own licence, code or statute, its own delivery timetable, and a dependency on the others. The sequence starts with the DCC pipe, then moves through shared infrastructure, consent, settlement, codes, security and the data model that lets one organisation's records mean the same thing to another.

The DCC: the single smart-data pipe

The Data Communications Company is one licensed company, Smart DCC Ltd, holding one licence, the Smart Meter Communications Licence. It is the single pipe between the smart meter fleet and every authorised user of the data. The statutory basis for the smart-meter communications regime now sits in Schedule 16 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025.¹⁵ The licence runs to September 2027, and the tender for the successor operator has already run, so the next holder has to take over without a break in service.

The pipe has four working parts. A central broker, the DCC Data Service Provider, authenticates each supplier, applies the routing rules in the Smart Energy Code, signs the message and hands it to a regional carrier. Two carriers split Great Britain: one covers the north on long-range mesh radio, the other covers the central and southern regions on cellular networks, between them reaching at least 99.25 percent of premises. At the home, the communications hub bridges the wide-area network to the short-range home network that the meters sit on; a dual-band hub reaches gas meters and thick-walled homes that a single band could not, lifting in-home coverage from about 70 percent to about 96.5 percent. The meter runs the request and signs the reply.

Two signing layers keep the data trustworthy. The Smart Metering Key Infrastructure seals the reading between the meter and the authorised party, so the DCC in the middle carries it sealed and cannot read it. The DCC Key Infrastructure seals the transport between the DCC and the supplier. Certificate lifetimes were extended to fourteen years under a cryptographic refresh programme, and a residual one percent of premises with no carrier signal are reached through a virtual wide-area network that uses the home broadband router with the household's consent. Smart-meter rules strengthened on 30 January 2026 added guaranteed standards of performance, so a household receives automatic compensation if a supplier misses an installation appointment, a fix duty, or a fault assessment.

The Data Sharing Infrastructure: sharing without bilateral contracts

The smart-data pipe carries meter readings. A great deal of other energy data, the network's operational telemetry, its planning models, its outage plans, has to move between organisations too, and historically each pair of organisations signed its own data-sharing contract. With dozens of parties that becomes hundreds of contracts and a barrier to sharing. The Data Sharing Infrastructure replaces that with one shared arrangement. It has three working ideas. Each participant runs a Data Preparation Node at its own boundary, so its data stays with it. A central Data Sharing Mechanism holds a catalogue of what data exists and brokers who may see it, but stores no data itself. And a Trust Framework provides one common set of legal and technical terms, so a single accreditation replaces the bilateral contracts.

Ofgem set the governance for the infrastructure and appointed NESO to coordinate its build during an interim period that sunsets in 2028; the system operator runs it, Ofgem regulates it, and an advisory group gives industry a voice.³ Participants fall into four domains, each with its own regulator or code body and its own legal base. The first live use cases are deliberately practical: outage planning ran as the early demonstrator, and connections reform is the flagship first product, with wider release planned across 2028 to 2030.⁸

Consent, flexibility registration and the Market Facilitator

Two of the four domains depend on machinery that is being built now. The consumer side needs a way for a household to grant and withdraw permission for others to use its energy data. The market side needs a way for a flexibility provider, the kind of business that pools home batteries, electric-car chargers and solar panels, to register its assets once rather than separately for every market.

On consent, Ofgem decided on 29 April 2025 to appoint the Retail Energy Code Company to build and run an enduring, digital Consumer Consent Solution, so that a consumer can grant and manage consent to share their energy data from one place rather than supplier by supplier.²⁰ A first version is due in late 2026, covering domestic consumers, and where data is accessed through the settlement-era data service and consent is required, use of the consent solution is mandatory. This is the piece that makes the third-party access domain safe: an approved business reads a household's data only with consent that the household can see and revoke.

On the market side, Ofgem decided that Elexon will act as the Market Facilitator, coordinating the patchwork of local and national flexibility markets and standardising their data and processes.²¹ Under that role, Flexibility Market Asset Registration gives a flexibility provider a single registration: an aggregator enrols its assets once with its network operator or the system operator and can then take part in more than twenty flexibility markets, instead of repeating the registration on many separate platforms. Ofgem brought the launch forward to 2027.²² Both the consent solution and the registration service are participants in the data-sharing infrastructure above: the consent solution sits in the consumer domain, the registration service in the markets domain.

The data-sharing rulebook: presumed open, with reasons to close

The default for energy data in Great Britain is open. Ofgem's Data Best Practice guidance, written into the network licences, has eleven principles, the defining one being that every data asset is presumed open: the holder must give an objective reason to keep something closed, rather than a reason to open it. A companion triage process names the five reasons that can justify closing data, privacy, security, harm to consumers, commercial sensitivity, and law or regulation, and requires the holder to try the least restrictive option, such as aggregating or blurring the data, before defaulting to closed.⁹

The worked example of presumed-open at scale is the Embedded Capacity Register that each network operator publishes monthly: a public list of the generation and storage connected and contracted on its network, to a common format. It is the foundation a developer uses to choose where to seek a connection, and it is described on the connections page. The Open Networks programme that standardised these formats across the network operators concluded in 2025, and the Market Facilitator has absorbed its legacy of aligned flexibility products and common processes. The strategic plans, the Future Energy Scenarios, the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan and the Centralised Strategic Network Plan, all publish into this same rulebook.¹²¹³

Half-hourly settlement: the July 2027 cutover

Market-wide Half Hourly Settlement moves every electricity meter point onto half-hourly settlement. Today most homes are settled on an estimated monthly profile; after the change, every meter point is settled on its actual half-hourly readings. The legal mechanism is Balancing and Settlement Code Modification P478, and Elexon runs the programme against a numbered milestone framework.¹⁴ Migration began on 22 October 2025, passed ten million meter-point initiations in early 2026, and works toward a readiness gate in late 2026, full implementation in May 2027, and the changeover in July 2027.¹¹

The settlement data flow runs from the meter through the communications hub and the DCC to the supplier or to a settlement-era data service, which feeds the readings to Elexon. The half-hourly run after the changeover will be one of the largest single data flows that any infrastructure-mediated use case has to consume, which is why the settlement programme and the data-sharing infrastructure, though delivered separately, are watched together.⁸

The Smart Energy Code and the Retail Energy Code

Two multi-party codes hold the metering and switching machinery together. The Smart Energy Code is the agreement among suppliers, network operators, manufacturers and the DCC that governs anyone who reads or writes data through the pipe: the device specifications, the interface protocol, the security regime, the performance rules and the dispute machinery. The Retail Energy Code governs switching: it replaced an older stack of separate agreements and registries, and the Central Switching Service it runs holds the master registry of electricity and gas supply points, with a next-working-day switching target. The Energy Act 2023 changed how both codes are managed, with Ofgem now selecting and licensing code managers.¹⁷

The two codes meet at the supplier and at the consent layer, and that meeting point is where operational care is needed. A switch handled under the Retail Energy Code triggers a re-pairing of the meter with the new supplier under the Smart Energy Code: the old supplier's access is revoked and the routing is updated so the next request reaches the right meter. The guaranteed standards of performance introduced in early 2026 are designed to make that handover smooth for the household. The codes refer to the same meter fleet but touch different things: a Smart Energy Code change touches the device or the security regime, a Retail Energy Code change touches registration, switching or consent.

Privacy and cyber security

Privacy rests on a sector framework that sits over UK data-protection law. The Data Access and Privacy Framework sets purpose limits and grades how granular a consumer's data a supplier may take by default: monthly for a domestic consumer, with an opt-in for daily or half-hourly, and microbusinesses able to opt out of anything finer than monthly.¹⁶ The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 widens the legal base so an approved third party can read a consumer's data for a defined purpose, with the consent flowing through the Consumer Consent Solution; the smart-data scheme it creates is modelled on Open Banking but runs under its own regime.¹⁰ The policy for the framework is owned by the energy department, with the Information Commissioner as the data-protection regulator.⁷

Security is built into the metering devices and the codes rather than added on. Every meter, gas meter and communications hub is assured under a national security scheme run with the National Cyber Security Centre before it can join the network, and the two signing layers in the pipe diagram above mean a reading is sealed end to end and the transport is authenticated. The smart system tightens some risks, such as energy theft, which a dedicated service detects from consumption patterns under the Smart Energy Code, while adding new ones, such as meter tampering and hub spoofing, which the device-assurance scheme is designed to contain. The move to half-hourly data and to third-party access raises the stakes on both privacy and security, which is why consent is being put on a single auditable footing and device assurance is mandatory.

The shared data model that ties it together

All of this only works if a record made by one organisation means the same thing to another. That is the job of a shared data model, the Common Information Model, maintained internationally and adopted in Great Britain for network data. The base model and the distribution profile come from the international standards bodies, and the transmission interchange uses a related European specification; the British governance of the profiles runs through the BSI CIM Engagement Hub.⁵⁶⁴

The Long Term Development Statement is the first large GB instance of this model in practice: a regulator-directed move from spreadsheets to a validated, machine-readable network model, published on a set cadence, with Stage 2 out on 29 May 2026.¹² It is treated in full on the LTDS explained page. The reason it matters here is that it sets the pattern the rest of the digital layer is expected to follow: regulator-set, validated, machine-readable publication that the data-sharing infrastructure can then federate across the four domains. The pipe carries the readings, the infrastructure shares the wider data, the codes govern the machinery, consent and security decide who sees what, and the shared model makes the records mean the same thing everywhere.