Artificial intelligence (AI) forecasting non-profit organisation Open Climate Fix (OCF) has published an open letter calling on ministers to unlock energy datasets, and warned that Britain’s grid is “running on data infrastructure built for the age of coal”.
The letter, published on 22 October, was backed by a coalition that includes Claire Young MP, a member of the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, the Centre for Public Data, energy think tanks Ember and Regen, and a Google DeepMind researcher that signed in a personal capacity.
It argued that much of the data artificial intelligence (AI) tools need to cut bills and make the grid resilient sits with network operators, generators and suppliers, but are often locked behind private systems or published in formats that cannot easily be used. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has named access to data as the first of six barriers to AI adoption in its vision for an AI-enabled clean energy system.
OCF sets out three demands:
- Government should make unlocking priority energy data an explicit part of the clean power mission, using the forthcoming AI for Clean Energy Strategy as the vehicle.
- DESNZ should expedite publication of priority datasets – network, consumption, rooftop solar, weather, flexibility and industrial energy use data – at a granularity that makes them genuinely usable.
- Ofgem should regulate for usability, not just publication, so datasets are timely, machine-readable and standardised.
The letter pointed to rooftop solar as the clearest gap. Solar provided about 6.5% of UK electricity in 2025, but there is no public record of its live, half-hourly output. OCF – whose open source models it said have halved forecasting errors at the National Energy System Operator (NESO) – said national figures are instead estimated from data covering less than 0.3% of live solar capacity, scaled up more than 300x, at an error rate of about 5%.
It estimated that closing the gap would quadruple the savings from its NESO partnership from £30m to £120 m a year, rising to hundreds of millions of pounds as the UK moves toward its 2035 solar targets.
“Opening up energy data is one of the few solutions that needs no new power stations or cables. The forthcoming AI for Clean Energy strategy is the moment to do it,” said Dan Travers, chief executive of Open Climate Fix.
Claire Young MP said energy bills are “rightly at the top of the government’s agenda”, and that “better grid data could be part of the answer” to bringing them down.
The letter lands as government, regulator and networks are already moving on data. Government and Ofgem’s Energy Digitalisation Framework sets a direction for coordination, but the letter argues “coordination alone will not fix this”.
Ofgem published its “Securing Open Data in Energy” consultation in May, and network operators maintain they already share “unprecedented” volumes of data. The reality is fragmented: the six distribution network operators (DNOs) publish open data on different platforms, under different licences and in different formats, so availability does not equal usability (see box below).
This all matters because AI workloads and the datacentre pipeline are among the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand, while the connection queue gets filled with speculative projects. Meanwhile, the price of an opaque grid is met in balancing charges based on gas prices that reach business and household bills.
