Unlocking data-driven innovation in the UK energy sector.

The Open Energy programme’s mission is to make it easy for any organisation in the UK to search, access and securely share energy data.

Our services provide the infrastructure for data sharing, including powerful Energy Search, financial-grade security, and (coming soon!) easy access control for commercial data.

These services are designed in collaboration with industry advisory groups and a sector steering group, in which we define codes of practice for the programme and the sector.

All these efforts are underpinned by our Trust Framework for data sharing.

Open Energy is developed and operated by IcebreakerOne.org, an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organisation making data work harder to deliver Net Zero. It is supported by UKRI, BEIS and Ofgem as well as dozens of industry actors.

Frequently Asked Questions

Open Energy makes it easy to search, access, and securely share energy data. Backed by Ofgem and the UK Government, it brings together data held by thousands of individual organisations and institutions in an open marketplace.

There are three parts of the Open Energy service. Energy Search makes it easy to find data that’s already openly shared. Access Control makes it more efficient to access commercial data that can’t be shared openly by automating security and legal checks. The Forum gives you a say in how the Open Energy service develops.

Open Energy Membership means your organisation can use the most valuable part of the service: Access Control, which automates data licensing, security checks and technical integration. Access Control means organisations holding data can publish it securely, knowing their data will only ever be shared according to the rules and policies they’ve agreed to. Organisations who need to access data can access hundreds of datasets with just one round of authentication, saving time and money by avoiding countless data requests and contract negotiations.

Our long term vision is to modernise access to the energy data across industry and address decarbonisation and the climate crisis via economic innovation. Roll out of the Open Energy project and principles will enable actors in the energy industry to interact better with each other, allowing governments, investors, businesses and consumers to make better decisions to drive to Net Zero.
  • Sign up as a member to use Open Energy
  • Get involved in helping us develop Open Energy as part of our Forum.
  • If you are in industry, academia, government, technology or on the consumer side of the energy sector, and want to be involved in building the energy data ecosystem, we want to hear from you! Contact us via email, or sign up as a member to support our work.

Becoming a Member of Open Energy means cutting the cost of data sharing, getting a step ahead of regulation, and keeping your data secure. Members use the Open Energy platform to share your data, agree licensing terms, and manage access all in one place.

Members of Open Energy use Access Control to automate the licensing, security checks and technical integration needed to share data that can’t be published openly.

Using Access Control, Open Energy Member organisations who own data can publish it securely, knowing their data will only ever be shared according to the rules and policies they’ve agreed to. Set your terms and security requirements once, and Access Control will apply those rules to every organisation that wants to use your data.

Open Energy Members who need to access data can access hundreds of datasets with just one round of authentication. Understand licensing and data costs upfront, and scale up your use of data.

Open Energy Membership is the easiest way to comply with data-sharing regulations like Data Best Practice, the Digitalisation Action Plan, and the Energy Digitalisation Task Force.

It also makes it easier to live up to the Data Best Practises, Ofgem’s Digitalisation Strategy and Action Plan (DSAP), and helps you implement your Digital Strategy.

Members of Open Energy are represented at Advisory Groups – a group of organisations using the service who steer its development and represent the interests of all members. Advisory Groups shape Open Energy by creating the use cases used to develop the service, and developing the policies and rules used to share data securely.

Open Energy is governed by expert groups providing input from across the industry. We work in an open and transparent way and share regular updates on progress at energy.icebreakerone.org. We always welcome feedback and input! If you are interested in participating in future Open Energy governance mechanisms please contact openenergy@icebreakerone.org.

Open Energy aims to serve all actors looking to share energy data, access energy data, or both! We are designing our non-profit service to be accessible for all actors – from large companies through small-scale research groups or non-profits. Our Energy Data Search function is free and open to the public. Anyone can use this to discover useful datasets and be linked directly to Open data. Beyond this, actors can join the Open Energy membership as Data Providers, Service Providers, or both. Membership enables sharing of and/or access to more sensitive datasets via our Governance Platform.

Open Energy can be used in a number of different ways. With our Energy Search, you can easily discover energy datasets. When datasets are not open, our access control features will make it easy to share and access these datasets.

The possibilities for value creation with data from Open Energy are endless. For example, in this post we outline how Open Energy can help with EV charge point rollout in the UK. Keep an eye out for more use cases in the future!

Personal data is defined under GDPR as: ‘any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (data subject).’ This is either directly or indirectly – where data or information is combined. Data ceases to be personal when it is made anonymous, and an individual is no longer identifiable. But for data to be truly anonymised, the anonymisation must be irreversible. Data that has been encrypted, de-identified or pseudonymised but can be used to re-identify a person is still personal data.

The responsibilities for sharing personal data lie with the data controllers of the datasets whose metadata is listed in Open Energy Search. This includes responsibilities for: establishing the lawful bases for sharing, management of consent where that applies, informing data subjects, and putting in place the appropriate personal data sharing agreements with another data controller.

That said, Open Energy’s governance framework has been designed to prohibit the sharing of personal data between members for data listed in Open Energy Search. This is because it has not been found necessary or proportional against the use cases examined so far. When personal data unintentionally does appear in a data set mitigations have been put in place for its removal from appearing in Open Energy Search.

Our Energy Search is ready to use now, try it here. New datasets are becoming available on Search all the time.

Open Energy Search already includes datasets from key actors such as UKPN, BEIS, National Grid, and SSE. Datasets include wind and solar forecasts, historic electricity demand, EV chargepoints (current charge points and future demand), and much more. More data is being indexed all the time, check it out here!