Digital Energy Services White Paper

Traditional energy retailers and new market entrants are starting out on their journey to become providers of “digital energy services” instead of just suppliers of kilowatt hours of electricity and gas. This is a challenging voyage into a new digital world of changing consumer habit and expectations along with rapidly evolving technologies at a time when the competitive environment in the energy industry is undergoing fundamental changes.

Choosing the right technology platform is a critical step in reducing business risk and maximising the chances of success through this transition. Digital energy services require a capable end-to-end solution which consist of in-home devices, cloud services and apps to capture data from electricity and gas meters as well as other sensors in the home.   It also needs to transfer data to the cloud, transform it into useful information and feed the results into engaging consumer applications.    

Despite years of trials and initial deployments, the market’s understanding of the key success criteria for these enabling technology platforms is still limited.  The approach of selecting technology for trials and hoping to scale it up for mass deployments is the core of the problem – just as you don’t build a sky scraper by stacking storage containers, deploying a high-volume digital services platform is not a case of scaling up a pilot. As major blue-chip companies in other industries have found out at great cost, the challenges of cyber security, compliance with data privacy legislation, service quality, customer retention and building a sustainably profitable digital business are real. Only by strategically selecting technology platforms that are built to deal with these challenges at “production scale” can companies be confident of success in this new world.

This white paper along with the series of blogs aims to help companies entering the digital energy services market with their evaluation of such technology platforms by discussing these criteria, grouped into five main categories: System Security & Data Protection, Logistics & Support, Meter Ecosystem Coverage, Quality of Service and Total Cost of Ownership.

About the authors

This white paper was written by Rik Temmink (Chief Data Services Officer) and Adrian van den Heever (Chief Technology Officer) of geo, the UK’s leading smart energy technology company. If you would like to explore the topics discussed in this white paper in more detail, please contact geo by phone on +44(0)1223 850 210 or by email at marketing@geotogether.com.

Download the full white paper here