Modernising energy data infrastructure
Richard Salmon (left) and Isaac Moreno Navarro
BY RICHARD SALMON and ISAAC MORENO NAVARRO
“ …the UK’s energy networks must undergo near-complete renewal to deliver on planned investment and growth targets across the country…”
The UK’s energy transition is accelerating, but the sector faces a challenge that cannot be solved by physical infrastructure alone.
We are at a critical juncture: the UK’s energy networks must undergo near-complete renewal to deliver on planned investment and growth targets across the country.
To achieve this while progressing towards a Net Zero economy, digitalising the energy system is not merely desirable—it is a fundamental requirement.
Operating a decentralised, electrified, and flexible system at scale requires a secure, real-time, and interoperable data infrastructure. As specialists in digital modernisation and data management, Aker Systems enables energy market participants to build this interconnectivity network for data.
When considering the shift from legacy to digital systems, and the desire to integrate AI, in particular Large Language Models (LLM), organisations can become trapped in a state of continual Pilot or MVP phases.
This can be attributed to data investment not keeping pace with the speed of AI and Data Science rollout and lack of well-funded AI-readiness programmes focussed on high-quality data.
“Investment in transmission infrastructure acts as an enabler for the wider economy. Every substation, converter station, cable route and overhead line supports wider supply chains, creates employment opportunities and helps attract long-term investment into local areas.”
Aligning the vision between public operators and industry is essential for the energy system to adopt a "digital-first" approach. This ensures the grid can meet real-time operational demands while embedding interoperability directly into its core architecture.
Ultimately, an open and transparent data environment is required to facilitate seamless coordination across all market participants.
Achieving this goal requires several substantial shifts in data management, in line with the National Energy System Operator (NESO) sector digitalisation strategy [1]:
Event-Driven Architecture: Batch processing must yield to event-driven architectures. Streaming data pipelines and Change Data Capture (CDC) ensure automated systems and operators continuously work with the latest state and real-time data.
Open Data Formats: Transitioning to Data Lakehouse architectures relies on open data formats, such as Apache Iceberg, to unify analytical data in a single repository. This allows multiple analytical engines to query the same data natively, eliminating dataset duplication across disparate systems.
Semantic Consistency: A shared data definition, or ontology, is necessary to ensure data maintains consistent meaning regardless of its source system. Without semantic consistency, algorithmic decision-making becomes fundamentally unreliable at scale.
Intentional Data Hygiene: Investment in fixing historic and recent data stored in multiple, often legacy systems is a challenge for businesses where the value of doing so is unqualified or a perceived lower priority. The shift to AI-enabled operations exposes this to a much greater degree than traditional approaches to managing technical debt i.e. contain and then replace.
Secure Digitalisation for AI: widespread AI adoption and integration of data science applications into operational processes means re-aligning data from multiple sources and addressing security implications of allowing AI services wider access to data.
Implementing a digitalised system based on these principles improves performance and responsiveness while unlocking significant economic benefit—reports vary between £40 and £70 billion of potential digital savings by 2050.
“Aligning the vision between public operators and industry is essential for the energy system to adopt a "digital-first" approach. This ensures the grid can meet real-time operational demands while embedding interoperability directly into its core architecture.”
Aker brings extensive experience in managing and deploying mission-critical data infrastructure, alongside proven engineering capability across some of the UK’s most sensitive Central Government platforms, expertise directly applicable to the energy sector.
Our approach aligns directly with the objectives of the National Energy System Operator (NESO) Data Sharing Infrastructure / Digital Spine by enabling secure, real-time, and governed data exchange across networks.
The core differentiator in Aker’s approach is treating data as a product. In this model, each domain generates and owns its data, with clear responsibility for how it is managed, governed, and published.
Data can then be shared natively across the organisation and into AI-driven processes, while remaining abstracted from the underlying infrastructure.
Every data product connects to a formal data contract, written in code, automating schema enforcement, data quality rules, and service-level agreements.
This guarantees that published data is broadly available and trustworthy, increasing trust and interoperability between wholesale (larger infrastructure) and retail (consumer/local) market participants. Larger energy market participants can confidently invest in data products that enable smaller participants to openly share their data and models.
Our proven real-time data services effortlessly handle high-volume streams from millions of connected devices, enabling predictive maintenance, algorithmic balancing, and automated asset optimisation.
Aker delivers these capabilities alongside integrated auditing and Zero Trust security by default, ensuring national-scale resilience.
“An effective, efficient, and reliable data-sharing system eliminates the bottleneck of legacy systems, which historically add multi-year delays to data projects lacking proper modernisation”.
An effective, efficient, and reliable data-sharing system eliminates the bottleneck of legacy systems, which historically add multi-year delays to data projects lacking proper modernisation.
Aker accelerates this transition by deploying AI-powered migration tools like Azure Migrate and AWS Transform. Acting as a suite of purpose-built agents, these tools manage discovery, code transformation, and phased planning for legacy environments.
This automation compresses modernisation timelines from years to months, freeing internal engineering teams to focus on operational integration and enabling data previously trapped in legacy silos.
The future of energy will be defined by data, and Aker Systems provides the AI-ready data platforms, engineering precision, and data expertise needed to realise it.
Richard Salmon is Client CTO - Energy & Utilities and Isaac Moreno Navarro is Lead Solution Architect at Aker Systems.
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