Who produces, governs and consumes Great Britain energy data, and how the regime compares with the EU, the United States, Australia and the Nordics in May 2026

The six producer families behind every GB energy dataset

The producer side of the data layer is the layer at which bytes come into existence. A reader who arrives at one of the open data portals and downloads a CSV is reading a producer's output through a custodian's publication route; the producer is the meter, the substation, the publication routine or the modelling pipeline that generated the bytes in the first instance. The six producer families below cover every dataset the workspace tracks; each family carries a producer profile (what it generates, at what cadence, with what licence) and a handover profile (which custodian it hands data to).

P1. The SMETS2 smart meter fleet, 33 million units in the field

The SMETS2 fleet is the largest single producer of bytes in the GB energy data layer. As of early 2026 around 35.9 million domestic and small non-domestic electricity and gas meters are installed; of these about 33 million are SMETS2 under the second-generation Smart Energy Code specification. Each electricity meter takes a half-hourly active-import reading at the close of each half-hour and (where solar export is present) a half-hourly active-export reading; gas meters take a daily reading by default and half-hourly readings when the consumer is on a Time of Use tariff. Each reading is pushed to the Data Communications Company over the SMETS2 communications hub. After Market-wide Half Hourly Settlement cuts over at Milestone M16 in July 2027, the volume reaches 33 million MPANs times 48 half-hourly observations per day, or roughly 1.6 billion observations per day flowing through the central settlement chain.¹⁰ The licence for the data is the consumer's: the meter belongs to the supplier, but the consumption pattern is personal data under UK GDPR after the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, and the legal route to read it past settlement and statutory operation is the consumer's authorisation through the Energy Smart Data and Privacy Framework.¹⁴

P2. The Distribution Network Operators, six owner groups holding fourteen licence areas

The Distribution Network Operators are the licensees at and below 132 kilovolts in England and Wales and below 132 kilovolts in Scotland (in Scotland the 132 kilovolt tier sits with SP Transmission and SSEN Transmission). Six owner groups hold the fourteen licence areas across GB: UK Power Networks across London, South Eastern and Eastern; SP Energy Networks across SP Distribution and SP Manweb; Northern Powergrid across North East and Yorkshire; Electricity North West Ltd for the North West single area; National Grid Electricity Distribution across East Midlands, West Midlands, South Wales and South West; and SSEN Distribution across Scottish Hydro and Southern Electric. Each DNO produces the Long Term Development Statement (covering forecast network state for the next ten years), the Embedded Capacity Register (covering connected generation and storage), the Distribution Future Energy Scenarios (the DNO-area counterpart of NESO's FES), the Network Development Plan, and the open-data portal (with the UK Power Networks Opendatasoft portal hosting 134 datasets as one example of the family).¹⁵ From 29 May 2026 the LTDS publishes in CGMES 3 format under the third Ofgem derogation letter rather than in Excel files; the volume per Stage 2 publication is around 500 megabytes per DNO across the CGMES profiles, with mRIDs tying each topology element to a stable identifier across publication cycles.

P3. The three Transmission Owners (NGET, SP Transmission, SSEN Transmission)

National Grid Electricity Transmission owns the assets above 132 kilovolts in England and Wales; SP Transmission owns the assets above 132 kilovolts in central and southern Scotland and at 132 kilovolts and above there; SSEN Transmission owns the assets at 132 kilovolts and above in the north of Scotland. Each TO produces the Electricity Ten Year Statement (under SO Licence Special Condition C12 historically, now under the post-NESO settlement), the Network Development Plan, and the SCADA telemetry feed that NESO consumes for real-time system operation. PMUs (Phasor Measurement Units) at the transmission level produce thirty to sixty samples per second of voltage and current phasor data tagged with a GPS timestamp; the PMU feed does not leave the TO in normal operation and is the operational substrate that NESO uses to manage system stability. The TO also produces the LTDS publication for transmission alongside the DNOs from the third derogation letter cadence forward.¹

P4. The National Energy System Operator

NESO went live as a publicly owned corporation on 1 October 2024 under Energy Act 2023 Part 5, with HM Government acquiring the Electricity System Operator subsidiary from National Grid plc for an enterprise value of around 630 million pounds.⁷ NESO is now the single most consequential publisher in the data layer. It runs the Balancing Mechanism in real time and publishes the bid-offer acceptances and system buy and sell prices into BMRS at half-hourly cadence; it publishes the Future Energy Scenarios each July under the NESO Open Licence; it operates the Carbon Intensity API at 30-minute regional granularity across 14 GB regions with a 96-hour forecast; it maintains the NESO Data Portal at neso.energy/data-portal as the open catalogue for every NESO-owned dataset; it convenes the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan with DESNZ, with the methodology published in May 2025 and the first iteration due in Q4 2026; it convenes the Centralised Strategic Network Plan with Ofgem, with the methodology approved in April 2026, the transitional T-CSNP due in June 2026 and the first full CSNP delivery due by the end of 2028; it publishes the Connections Reform Gate 2 register that progressed 283 gigawatts of generation and storage and 99 gigawatts of demand to firm offers in April 2026.^{5 11}

P5. The retail suppliers (around sixty licensees)

The retail supplier is the consumer's counterparty in the retail relationship. Around sixty supply licences are active across the domestic and non-domestic markets in May 2026, with the largest five suppliers (British Gas Centrica, EDF Energy, E.ON Next, Octopus Energy, Scottish Power) carrying roughly 70 percent of domestic supply by meter count. Suppliers produce the aggregated half-hourly meter data submission into central settlement (after MHHS cutover, the half-hourly volume produced flows through Elexon as the central administrator), the tariff data on the consumer side (variable, fixed, Time of Use, Economy 7, Economy 10, EV-only tariffs and the like), the billing data on the consumer side (with the bill itself produced monthly, quarterly or annually depending on the tariff), and the supplier-of-last-resort transfer data when a supplier exits the market. Suppliers also operate the consumer-facing portion of the Energy Smart Data and Privacy Framework: a consumer who authorises a price-comparison service to read their half-hourly data passes the authorisation through their supplier, who in turn opens the route through the DCC to the third party.¹⁴

P6. Smart meter manufacturers and the settlement administrator

The smart meter manufacturers (Aclara, Honeywell Elster, EDMI, Itron, Landis+Gyr, Toshiba, the larger group) produce the specification-compliance artefacts that the Smart Energy Code references; each new SMETS2 meter is approved against the version of the specification that was current at certification. Elexon, the Balancing and Settlement Code administrator, is also a producer in the central-settlement frame: BSC P408 (approved in November 2022) defined the post-MHHS settlement run; the Data Integration Platform went live on 4 August 2025 and from go-live has processed over one billion messages across 81 plus market participants; the Initial Settlement Run is followed by the R1, R2, R3, RF and DF reconciliation runs at progressively longer intervals (R1 at fourteen calendar days, R2 at four months, R3 at fourteen months, RF at twenty months, DF at twenty-eight months) with each reconciliation correcting for late-arriving meter data. The settlement run itself is a produced dataset that planners, traders and academics read.¹⁰

The six custodian institutions that own publication and metadata

The custodian role is the role of holding a dataset under a stable identifier, a licence, a publication cadence and a metadata description, and of binding the route that a consumer takes to read it. Every dataset has at least one custodian; some have a chain (the BSC P408 settlement run is administered by Elexon as the custodian inside the BSC frame, but the route a planner takes to read the published output runs through BMRS as a separately governed publication route). The six custodian institutions below cover every publication route the workspace tracks.

C1. Ofgem and the Gas and Electricity Markets Authority

The Gas and Electricity Markets Authority is a corporation sole created by the Utilities Act 2000 s.1 and composed of non-executive and executive members appointed by the Secretary of State at DESNZ. The day-to-day staff body is the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, known universally as Ofgem. Ofgem grants and amends licences under Electricity Act 1989 s.6 and Gas Act 1986 s.7; approves modifications to the seven legally weighted industry codes; sets the default tariff cap under the Domestic Gas and Electricity (Tariff Cap) Act 2018; regulates retail conduct under Standard Licence Conditions; runs the RIIO price-control settlements (RIIO-T2 and RIIO-ED2 are live, with RIIO-T3 and RIIO-GD3 Final Determinations issued on 4 December 2025); issues the Data Best Practice Guidance (DBPG, the most recent revision at v3.5 of 30 June 2025); and administers the Energy Industry Cyber Assessment Framework. The custodian role for the LTDS sits with Ofgem in two senses: the licence condition that produces the LTDS is SLC 25 of the Electricity Distribution Licence (specifically SLC 25.2 which requires publication at intervals of not more than seven years), and the Directions that mandate the format and cadence (the LTDS Direction of 30 April 2024 and the three derogation letters of November 2024, March 2025 and 13 May 2026) all carry the Authority's name.¹

C2. BSI and the CIM engagement portal

The British Standards Institution is the UK national standards body and the operator of the CIM engagement portal at https://cim.bsigroup.com/. The engagement portal was confirmed by Ofgem in the 13 May 2026 derogation letter as the official location of record for LTDS data-exchange definition artefacts. The custodian role at BSI is the role of holding the GB-specific extensions to the CGMES 3 and IEC 61968-13 profiles, validating each published profile against the SHACL shapes hosted on the portal, running the working-group activity that produces the next revision of each profile, and routing GB feedback into the IEC and ENTSO-E standardisation processes. The portal is the canonical place a GB analyst, modeller or licensee engages with the CIM work for the LTDS; a sub-page reader looking for the current state of any profile starts at the portal.²

C3. The Energy Networks Association

The Energy Networks Association is the trade body for the gas and electricity network licensees. Its custodian role covers the Distribution Code (in joint custodianship with the Distribution Code Review Panel), the Engineering Recommendations (G98 Issue 2 of 10 March 2025 for micro-generation connections, G99 Issue 2 of 10 March 2025 for larger generators up to and including transmission-connected Types A, B, C and D, G5/5 of June 2020 for harmonic distortion, P29 Issue 1 of 1990 with a revision in progress for voltage unbalance), the Active Network Management template that DNOs use to run flexibility-contract zones, and the Open Networks programme outputs which sit at the join between DNO and DSO operation. The ENA is a private trade body rather than a statutory custodian; the statutory weight on each artefact comes from its incorporation into the Distribution Code which is part of the Distribution Licence. A reader pulling a G99 PDF off the ENA site is reading a primary engineering source that the Distribution Code references and that every connection has to meet.

C4. The NESO Data Portal

The NESO Data Portal at neso.energy/data-portal is the open catalogue for NESO-owned datasets. The portal hosts the Future Energy Scenarios published each July, the Electricity Ten Year Statement published each autumn, the Carbon Intensity dataset at 30-minute regional granularity across 14 GB regions, the constraint actions and ancillary procurement results, the Demand Insight feeds, the FES Outlook scenarios, the Gate 2 register published in April 2026 and the SSEP methodology and consultation outputs. The licence for almost every dataset is the NESO Open Licence (which is materially equivalent to CC BY 4.0 for downstream attribution).⁷ The Carbon Intensity API at carbonintensity.org.uk is the highest-traffic NESO-published dataset, with the 30-minute regional granularity and the 96-hour forecast supporting a wide range of consumer-side applications.⁵ The portal also catalogues the Operational Forecasts (demand, wind output, solar output, transmission flows) that NESO publishes daily.

C5. Elexon and the Balancing and Settlement Code

Elexon Limited trades as the corporate vehicle for the Balancing and Settlement Code Company (BSCCo). BSCCo is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, with its members being the BSC parties (suppliers, generators, traders and the system operator). The custodian role at Elexon covers the BSC itself (at version 52 in May 2026, with monthly modifications running through the BSC Panel and approved by Ofgem), the Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service (publishing physical notifications, final physical notifications, bid-offer acceptances, system buy and sell prices, system frequency and settlement-period imbalance volumes at half-hourly cadence), the Imbalance Settlement and Demand Forecasting functions, the Profile Administration role for non-half-hourly supply points (which retires at MHHS cutover), and from 4 August 2025 the cloud-based Data Integration Platform (DIP) that processes the half-hourly settlement load. The BMRS Insights API is the canonical machine-readable route into the published BMRS data; it is one of the most-read open data feeds in the workspace.⁶

C6. DESNZ and the policy framework

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero was created on 7 February 2023 by a machinery-of-government split of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. DESNZ is the policy owner for electricity, gas, nuclear, hydrogen, carbon capture, energy efficiency and net-zero strategy, the legal sponsor of NESO, the policy commissioner of the Smart Metering Programme, and the publisher of the Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES) and the quarterly Energy Trends release. For data specifically, DESNZ owns the Energy Smart Data and Privacy Framework (DAPF) which is the policy framework that the energy Smart Data scheme operates inside under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, the Energy Digitalisation Strategy and Action Plan published in March 2021 and refreshed in 2024, the Smart Data Roadmap published in September 2024, and the Energy and Emissions Projections that the Sub-national Energy Consumption statistics and the planning artefacts read against.^{4 14} The custodian role at DESNZ is the framework custodian: each operational dataset belongs to one of the other five custodians, but each policy frame and each statutory authorisation sits with DESNZ as the responsible department.

The six consumer families that read GB energy data

The consumer side of the data layer is the layer of readers. Every dataset has a consumer set, named or unnamed. A planner working a new connection at 132 kilovolts reads the LTDS topology to find headroom; a trader working the Day Ahead market reads BMRS to forecast imbalance; a supplier's billing engine reads the aggregated half-hourly meter data; a NESO control-room engineer reads PMU phasor data and SCADA telemetry; an academic researcher at Sheffield reads PV_Live and the NESO Demand Insight feeds; a household reads their bill and through the supplier the Citizens Advice consumer service. Six consumer families cover almost every reader the workspace tracks.

U1. Planners (DNO planning teams, TO planning teams, NESO strategic planning, connections analysts)

Planners are the largest single consumer family for the LTDS, the Embedded Capacity Register, the Distribution Future Energy Scenarios, the Network Development Plans and the LTDS Direction artefacts. A DNO planning team reads its own LTDS Stage 2 publication to understand the network model that connections applications will be assessed against; a TO planning team reads NESO's ETYS, the Gate 2 register and the SSEP methodology; a NESO strategic planning team reads the LTDS Stage 2 across every DNO area plus the TO ETYS to assemble the cross-licensee model that CSNP and SSEP need.⁷ The format change from Excel files to CGMES 3 under the third derogation letter has reshaped the planner workflow: where before a planner manually reconciled Excel files across DNO areas with bespoke parsing, after May 2026 a planner reads CGMES profiles through standard toolchains (CIM-Studio, CGMES Editor, custom CIM-aware analytics) and uses mRIDs to compare publication cycles.

U2. Traders (BSC parties, CfD generators, Capacity Market providers)

Traders are the consumers of the Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service. BSC parties (around 250 active suppliers, generators, traders and aggregators) read BMRS for physical notifications, bid-offer acceptances, system buy and sell prices and imbalance volumes; CfD generators read the strike price and the reference price as the Contracts for Difference run; Capacity Market providers read the T-4 and T-1 auction clearing prices and the de-rated capacity registers. The half-hourly cadence of BMRS data through the Insights API is the operational substrate for nearly every market-facing analyst in GB. The ENTSO-E day-ahead price for the UK bidding zone is a parallel reference dataset that traders read alongside BMRS; it lands on the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform under a separate publication route, and gives traders a comparator for the UK price against the European market.^{6 13}

U3. Suppliers (the consumer-facing side of the same retail licensees that produce data)

Suppliers are both producers (they aggregate half-hourly meter data into central settlement) and consumers (they read central-settlement outputs back to compute their imbalance position, they read the DUoS and TNUoS charging methodologies to compute network-charge pass-through, they read the Renewables Obligation and the Climate Change Levy parameters published by DESNZ). The supplier-consumer dual role is one of the reasons the actor-and-role map is not a simple producer-to-consumer pipeline but a triangle: most of the actors play more than one role. A supplier reads central settlement to compute its imbalance exposure for the half-hour; reads DUoS to pass network charges through to the consumer bill; reads the price cap publication from Ofgem (quarterly default tariff cap announcement) to determine the maximum chargeable on a default tariff; reads the supplier-of-last-resort transfer data when another supplier exits the market; reads consumer-authorisation messages from the DAPF route to action a third-party read on the consumer's half-hourly data.¹⁴

U4. System operators (NESO control room, DNO ANM systems)

The NESO control room reads the real-time SCADA telemetry feed from the three TOs (voltage, current, power, frequency, tap-position at one-second to one-minute intervals), the PMU phasor data (thirty to sixty samples per second tagged with GPS timestamps), the BMRS feed of bid-offer acceptances, the Active Network Management signals from DNOs at the constrained-zone level, and the weather and demand forecasts that feed the day-ahead operational plan. The DNO ANM systems on Orkney (live since 2009) and on most GB DNO areas by 2026 read local voltage and current telemetry, the generator export schedules, the connection-stage flexibility contracts and the constraint zone definitions to manage real-time export ceilings on distributed generators. The system-operator consumer role is the highest-frequency consumer role in the data layer: most of the data flowing into the NESO control room and the DNO ANM systems is sub-minute cadence, and the published views of that operational substrate (through BMRS, Carbon Intensity, the NESO Demand Insight feeds) are downstream summaries of much higher-frequency raw data.

U5. Academic researchers and the open-data community

Sheffield Solar at the University of Sheffield runs the PV_Live solar-output dataset that is the canonical reference for GB solar output at half-hourly cadence with around-19 GW of capacity covered.⁹ University College London, Imperial College and the Energy Systems Catapult run modelling and analysis programmes on the NESO Open Licence datasets, on the LTDS, on the SSEP methodology outputs and on the Carbon Intensity API. The Energy Data Visualisation Programme run by Open Climate Fix and others reads NESO and DNO open-data feeds to produce public-facing visualisations of the GB system at half-hourly cadence. The academic consumer family is the slowest-cadence and the highest-effort consumer: a typical research project reads months or years of published data and runs analytics over it; a typical paper takes between three and eighteen months from data download to publication. The NESO Open Licence (and the equivalent UK Open Government Licence on DESNZ-published datasets) is the legal substrate that lets the academic community redistribute and republish derived datasets.⁷

U6. The public (households, advice services, consumer-facing bodies)

The public reads GB energy data through several routes. The household reads the bill (produced by the supplier and showing the energy charge, the standing charge, network charges, the Renewables Obligation pass-through, the Climate Change Levy on non-domestic supplies and VAT). The household reads the in-home display from the SMETS2 meter showing real-time consumption and cost. The household reads the Carbon Intensity API through any one of dozens of consumer applications (Carbon Intensity, Open Climate Fix tools, third-party energy apps).⁵ The advice services (Citizens Advice consumer service, the Energy Ombudsman, fuel-poverty bodies, Energy UK as the supplier trade body, Energy Action as the consumer-advocacy body) read the supplier data, the price cap publication, the fuel-poverty statistics (11.0 percent of English households or 2.7 million homes on the LILEE metric in the latest official statistics) and the Warm Homes Plan publication that funds energy-efficiency measures for 5 million homes.⁴ The Energy Ombudsman handles complaints under the Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Act 2007; it is the consumer-facing custodian of the dispute-resolution route.

Cross-border view: GB against the EU Clean Energy Package open-data regime

The European Union runs an open-data regime for the electricity sector that sits primarily on Regulation (EU) 2019/943 (the Electricity Regulation, part of the Clean Energy Package) and Regulation (EU) 543/2013 on data submission and publication. The regime is implemented through the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform at transparency.entsoe.eu, which is the canonical reference dataset for European electricity-system data. The platform publishes generation per type and per unit, generation forecasts, day-ahead and intraday prices, cross-border physical flows, cross-border commercial schedules, transmission outages, balancing-market data, and the ENTSO-E ten-year network development plan. The publication is mandatory for transmission system operators in the EU member states under the Electricity Regulation; the licence is the ENTSO-E open licence which is materially equivalent to CC BY 4.0 for downstream attribution.⁸

What GB has adopted from the EU regime

GB has retained, after EU exit, the substantive transparency obligations on the GB system operator. NESO publishes the GB equivalent of the ENTSO-E data through BMRS for the half-hourly settlement-period view and through the NESO Data Portal for the strategic-planning view. The ENTSO-E day-ahead price for the UK bidding zone is also published on the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform: GB remains a bidding zone on the platform for cross-border purposes, and the day-ahead price published there is the comparator that traders use against the GB internal price published on BMRS.¹³ The CGMES 3 standard that GB has adopted for the LTDS is the ENTSO-E standard that EU transmission system operators use for cross-border model exchange; the adoption is the most consequential ongoing alignment of GB with the EU regime, because it lowers the cost of cross-border model exchange through the interconnectors and gives GB analysts a shared schema with their EU counterparts.

What GB does that the EU regime does not

Three GB regime features go past the EU baseline. The first is the granularity of the GB transmission and distribution data publication: the LTDS Stage 2 in CGMES 3 publishes the distribution network at line-section and substation level, where the ENTSO-E platform publishes transmission only. The second is the open data portal model at NESO, which catalogues every NESO-owned dataset with a single open licence and a versioned URI; the EU equivalent is the data.europa.eu portal which catalogues open data across member states but does not run a single energy-sector open-data publication route. The third is the Carbon Intensity API: GB has been publishing 30-minute regional carbon intensity at 14-region granularity with a 96-hour forecast since 2017, with no equivalent at EU level.^{5 7}

What the EU regime does that GB does not

The EU regime carries two features that GB has not adopted. The first is the cross-border settlement framework under the Electricity Regulation (the imbalance settlement period harmonisation at 15 minutes, the cross-border balancing energy exchange under MARI and PICASSO). GB settles at half-hourly cadence and trades cross-border balancing through bilateral arrangements with the EU TSOs rather than through MARI and PICASSO. The second is the data altruism framework under the EU Data Governance Act 2022, which allows data subjects to grant a non-commercial third party broad access to their data for research and public-interest purposes; the GB equivalent is the smart-data scheme under the DAPF rather than a separately governed altruism framework.¹⁴

Cross-border view: GB against the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform

The ENTSO-E Transparency Platform is a useful direct comparator for the GB BMRS publication route because both serve the same role: machine-readable publication of system-wide electricity market and operational data at near-real-time cadence under an open licence. The two platforms have converged on a shared technical foundation (CGMES 3 for network models, JSON and CSV downloads for time-series data, REST APIs with token-based authentication for high-volume readers) and have diverged on the scope of what each publishes and the operational reach.

Scope: ENTSO-E covers thirty-seven TSOs across thirty-five countries

ENTSO-E membership covers thirty-seven transmission system operators across thirty-five European countries. The platform publishes data for the European synchronous area (continental Europe), the Nordic synchronous area, the British and Irish synchronous areas, and the Baltic synchronous area as it integrates. Each TSO is responsible for the data submission for its own bidding zone; ENTSO-E runs the platform and aggregates the published datasets. The platform covers generation per production type, actual generation per generation unit, day-ahead prices, balancing energy, cross-border physical flows, cross-border commercial schedules, transmission outages, and the ENTSO-E ten-year network development plan.⁸ The licence is the ENTSO-E open licence, attribution required.

Scope: GB BMRS covers the GB transmission system at half-hourly cadence

BMRS covers the GB transmission system at half-hourly cadence with the Insights API as the canonical machine-readable route. The Insights API publishes physical notifications, final physical notifications, bid-offer acceptances, system buy and sell prices, system frequency, settlement-period imbalance volumes, daily and monthly aggregations, and the Balancing Mechanism settlement runs themselves. The scope is more focused than ENTSO-E (one bidding zone rather than thirty-five countries) but the cadence is comparable and the licence is materially equivalent.⁶ The Insights API is run by Elexon as the BSC administrator; in the ENTSO-E equivalent, the platform is run by ENTSO-E itself with each TSO contributing data for its own zone.

Where the two platforms converge

The two platforms converge on the CGMES 3 standard for network model exchange, on the half-hourly to fifteen-minute settlement period (BMRS publishes at half-hour, ENTSO-E publishes at fifteen-minute under the EU regime, with GB now publishing at fifteen-minute for cross-border purposes from the third derogation letter cadence forward), on the JSON and CSV download formats for time-series data, and on the REST API access pattern. The convergence is one of the reasons GB and EU planners can run shared toolchains across cross-border interconnector studies: a planner pulling data from BMRS and from ENTSO-E for the same period of analysis can read both into a common toolchain without bespoke parsing.³

Cross-border view: GB against Australia (AEMO and the National Electricity Market)

The Australian electricity sector is run through the National Electricity Market (NEM) covering five states (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania) and the operating role of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). The Australian regime is a useful comparator for two reasons. First, it runs five-minute settlement (since 1 October 2021 under the AEMC five-minute settlement decision of 2017) which is the granularity that the REMA Phase 2 reform package is moving GB towards through the third settlement-period reform window. Second, it has had a Consumer Data Right applied to energy since November 2022, which is the antipodean equivalent of the DAPF Smart Data scheme in GB and is operationally five years ahead.

AEMO as the system operator and the data publisher

AEMO is the equivalent of NESO in GB. It runs the NEM dispatch engine, publishes the NEM Data Dashboard at aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem, runs the Market Settlement and Transfer Solution (MSATS) which is the central system for meter and customer data, runs the Wholesale Electricity Market in Western Australia, and is the strategic planner for the integrated system plan (ISP). The Data Dashboard publishes generation by fuel type at five-minute cadence, wholesale electricity prices at five-minute cadence, demand forecasts, transmission flows, and the rooftop PV generation estimates. The licence on the published data is the AEMO open licence; the cadence on most operational feeds is five-minute, which makes the Australian regime the highest-frequency open-data regime in the comparator set.⁷

The Consumer Data Right and Smart Data parallel

The Consumer Data Right (CDR) was created by the Treasury Laws Amendment (Consumer Data Right) Act 2019 and was applied to the banking sector first (mirror to UK Open Banking) and to the energy sector from November 2022. A consumer in CDR-applicable jurisdiction can authorise an accredited data recipient (a price-comparison service, a switching service, a budgeting application) to read their consumption data from their retailer. The Australian regime is around five years ahead of the GB DAPF Smart Data scheme in operational terms; a GB observer can read the Australian operational experience as a forward look at where the DAPF route lands once it goes live. The AEMC has published two CDR review reports since 2023; both report that uptake by consumers has been slower than the Open Banking experience but with steady growth from 2024 onward.⁶

Cross-border view: GB against the Nordics (Nord Pool, Elhub, datahub.fi)

The Nordic electricity market is the highest-maturity peer for GB on the consumer-side data infrastructure. Four TSOs (Statnett in Norway, Svenska Kraftnat in Sweden, Fingrid in Finland, Energinet in Denmark) operate the synchronous Nordic system; Nord Pool runs the day-ahead and intraday wholesale exchanges. Two national datahubs sit underneath the Nord Pool wholesale layer: Elhub at elhub.no in Norway, live since 28 February 2019 and serving 3.1 million metering points; datahub.fi at Fingrid in Finland, live since 21 February 2022 and serving 3.7 million metering points. The Nordic regime is the operational forward look for the GB MHHS plus DAPF combination.

Nord Pool as the wholesale comparator

Nord Pool runs the day-ahead market for the Nordic region plus Baltic states and the UK day-ahead through interconnector capacity. The Nord Pool day-ahead price is published at hourly cadence (in the Nordic regime) with the platform moving to fifteen-minute cadence under EU harmonisation through 2025 and 2026. A GB trader following the cross-border interconnector flows reads Nord Pool day-ahead, ENTSO-E day-ahead for the UK bidding zone, and BMRS for the GB internal market simultaneously to assess interconnector arbitrage opportunities.¹³

Elhub and datahub.fi as the consumer-side comparator

Elhub in Norway is the central national datahub for metering data. Every Norwegian smart meter reports through the local DSO to Elhub; Elhub holds the canonical record of consumption for every metering point and serves it to retailers, suppliers, third parties under consumer authorisation, and aggregators. Elhub processes around 30 million meter reads per hour at peak and 700 million per day at steady state. datahub.fi at Fingrid runs the same model for Finland with around 3.7 million metering points; both platforms went live with full coverage on day one. The GB equivalent is the supplier-plus-DCC route that the DAPF Smart Data scheme operates: rather than a central national datahub, the GB design holds the consumption record at the supplier with the DCC as the communications operator; the consumer's authorisation route to a third party runs through the supplier and the DCC rather than through a central datahub. The Nordic experience suggests that the central-datahub design reaches lower per-transaction cost at scale but requires up-front capital expenditure that GB has elected not to make.^{7 8}