The failure of players in the energy market to share data is costing the industry as much as £4 billion, legal practice Foot Anstey has said.
The law firm made the claim in a new report dubbed ‘Data in Energy Storage: Mine, Mine, Mine’, which it launched at Solar & Storage Live this morning.
The report reaches the conclusion that as much as £70,000 per megawatt of installed capacity is lost due to inefficiencies within that capacity which go unnoticed due to various players in the market being reluctant to share data.
When tallied up, it translates to a total efficiency loss worth around £4 billion across the entire UK network.
Foot Anstey has said that if asset owners, component manufacturers and system operators were more open to sharing this data such efficiencies would quickly be identified.
The firm worked alongside energy systems developer QBots on the report and Chris Pritchett, head of energy at Foot Anstey, said that the problem was that energy market professionals are often not aware of the value of the data they’re sitting on.
“No one necessarily has a ‘right’ to energy data, although some market players are becoming more alive to the potential in owning it.
“These organisations are starting to take steps to ensure it will be placed in their hands.
“But we’re not advocating that everyone suddenly starts to share everything they have, with no heed to the commercial impact. Instead, we see clusters of strategic partnerships developing and exciting localised projects such as smart cities and microgrids,” he said.
Breaking it down further, Foot Anstey said that 40% of those inefficiencies could be saved by better matching supply to demand using frequency response tenders as National Grid has already shown an appetite for.
A further 35% could be saved by using energy storage technologies to help balance generation capacities at the local distribution network level, while 15% of the total could be saved simply through better understanding of operational efficiencies across the supply network.
QBots founder Vijay Natarajan added: “We believe by sharing energy storage data huge benefits can be realised – as we are finding out in our projects in Manchester and Exeter.
“This requires more collaboration between tech companies like us, project developers, distributors and energy companies”
