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NESO offers new roadmap for UK energy digitalisation
10/9/2025
News
The National Energy System Operator (NESO) has published its first Energy Sector Digitalisation Plan as a roadmap to improvement of the sector’s public digital infrastructure. It was working in partnership with the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), Ofgem, the Royal Academy of Engineering, industry stakeholders and others.
NESO considers it critical for the energy sector to have a robust digital infrastructure to support the energy transition, ‘to enable seamless integration across energy systems, other economic sectors and wider society’, it says.
To achieve this goal, the entire energy system will need to adopt advanced modelling and AI, and align with data from other related economic sectors. The NESO energy sector digitalisation plan requires close collaboration between multiple stakeholders including DESNZ, the Retail Energy Code Company (RECCo), Elexon, NESO and others.
The plan identifies 16 ‘clear and deliverable’ actions aimed to deliver clean power by 2030. These cover:
- Consumer consent design and implementation, based on RECCo Retail Energy Code Company guidance to best practice for digital infrastructure.
- Continued operability, to ensure that necessary smart metering capability will be in place.
- Improved smart meter data access, aligning Elexon, DESNZ and RECCo.
- Network assist security.
- Asset hardware security, including analysis of the potential impact of quantum computing.
- Smart device interoperability standards.
- An asset information register.
- Standardisation of market interfaces.
- Control room technology requirements.
- Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) functional requirements.
- DSI operational requirements.
- Data Sharing Infrastructure ontology (a structured model) to ensure compliance and harmonised interoperable data.
- Alignment of trust frameworks between DESNZ, Ofgem, NESO and RECCo.
- Scoping of the digital coordination role by 2026.
- NESO to assume stewardship of the plan by establishing a clear governance framework to guide future annual iterations.
Launching the plan, Shubhi Rajnish, Chief Information Officer at NESO, said: ‘The Sector Digitalisation Plan sets the roadmap to deliver the lasting digital journey to make a robust digital infrastructure and seamless integration across systems, sectors and society, a reality.’ But he recognised this was ‘very much a first iteration and look forward to feedback as well as keeping pace with the evolving digital and technology landscape’.
