The Energy Industry’s Copy and Paste Data Superslowway

There is an unavoidable disconnect that slaps you in the face when you think about the great British smart meter rollout. Although we’re promised cutting edge technology in our homes, the systems that manage the dataflows surrounding installations of the new meter technology not only run on outdated servers and software but rely on a great deal of human intervention to gather and then manipulate data. For the most part, this data passes between industry actors as a less than glamorous csv file. While not exactly a case of ‘from the ridiculous to the sublime’ it’s not far off.

It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the dataflows are not still being faxed between market participants.

Actually, that’s not a joke: during the ongoing Covid lockdown, I know one market entity (that shall remain nameless) which could not respond to certain requests because they were unable to access remotely — wait for it — the fax machine at head office.

On a more hopeful note, however, there has been talk of ‘disruption’ across the industry press. Unfortunately, that hope — like the talk itself — has crashed upon the rocks of massed indifference. Coming from a background in IT systems for large corporates, I think of disruption as something that forces necessary changes on incumbent market players. I assumed, therefore, that disruption would lead to some extensive improvements in the way that data was managed across the industry. And remember, the theme for 2018’s Utility Week Live was ‘disruption’.

Two years go!

I searched in vain, however, for anything at the show that smacked of improved data management. Something, at the very least, that would embrace the automatic end-to-end processing of dataflows; in-line validation of data captured by the installation engineer; and serverless IT configurations to guarantee speed, capacity, and security.

No, what disruption appeared to refer to in the energy industry at that moment was how best to dig up roads for pipeline laying and maintenance with minimum…..well, disruption.

And nothing has changed in the interim.

I think it’s true to say that the installation engineer has been ignored when it comes to matters of data or new technology. For all the smarts embedded in the new generation of meters, the engineer’s job has remained pretty much the same. If anything, in fact, installations are now complicated by the fact that he or she needs to worry about data connectivity to the devices as much as connecting the fuel supply.

And if the engineer’s working on a field service app that doesn’t do much in the way of real-time validation or even return the commissioning process responses from the DCC as the new equipment comes online, there is a good chance that installations will take longer than they should do — or even fail — through no fault of the engineer.

The field service apps out there, along with the systems used to capture the data for regulatory flows, have not kept up to speed with the technological needs of the industry. The best analogy for this might be that, although we’re trying to create a high speed communications network for energy, we’re trying to do it using carrier pigeons.

Not good enough, is it?

In my next post I’m going to talk about how we can change things for the better; how we can become properly disruptive before all the pigeons die of coccidiosis.