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Digitalisation and data

Digitalisation of the energy system is at the heart of our transition to build a smart and efficient energy system, supporting the UK’s clear commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The requirements of our network are changing, driven by customers’ needs, decentralisation of generation now connected throughout our network and decarbonisation focussed on the increasing transition of the transport and heat sectors to electricity.

We are committed to digitalising our business to ensure that we remain an efficient and effective operator of our network and deliver data and solutions in the right format, at the right time to customers and stakeholders to meet their needs and ambitions.

Our focus to improve our data management, increase network insight and operation and to presume data as open will ensure that we deliver these aims to further improve our business efficiency, turn our data in to information to benefit customers, deliver insight for network capacity and connection planning and new service propositions.

Improved data management

We understand improving our data management is a journey that we need to track and measure to ensure we continue to focus in the right areas. We have already demonstrated improvements in our data management processes through targeted project activity to understand our data sets, lineage (how our data is derived and where from), and business and third-party use.

Increased network insight and operation

Leveraging value from data is fundamental to becoming a digitalised business. Innovation projects we have delivered have developed new solutions capable of providing enhanced visibility of our network, what it’s doing and what it’s likely to do. These solutions, together with advanced control systems, are being rolled out across our regions.

Delivering for stakeholders

We continue to add both raw datasets and user-friendly tools, in the form of interactive maps and systems to our Connected Data Portal. We understand that access to our data is vital to support a variety of current and future elements of the electricity and wider energy system. We also recognise that the needs of different customers and stakeholders are varied and data may need to be presented in different formats. 

User personas

We know that understanding our data users is key to delivering the right data and digitalised solutions and outcomes. To support this we’ve built upon our current data user types and have now developed some initial Beta User Personas to support further improving our understanding of data users’ needs and expectations. We will continue to seek engagement to inform reviews and updates as well as further expanding our User Personas to users not currently captured.

We always welcome direct engagement and feedback via nged.digitalisation@nationalgrid.co.uk on these or any of our data and digitalisation work and we currently have a survey open to provide your feedback specifically on our External User Personas.

Internal data user personas

External data user personas

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