Access to metering and consumption data: learning from national experiences

Access to consumer data based on consent is an essential element of the European policy promoting the empowerment of energy consumers and the development of innovative, data-driven services that can facilitate the transition to an efficient, low-carbon economy.

Article 23 of Directive (EU) 2019/944 on common rules for the internal market for electricity leaves the choice of how to organize data management and exchange to Member States, provided some basic rules are respected. Different solutions have been adopted, with some countries preserving a more decentralized data management model and others implementing a centralized data hub.

Irrespective of the choice they make, Member States shall facilitate full interoperability of energy services within the EU.[1] In this regard, Article 24 of the Directive foresees the adoption of implementing acts by the European Commission, defining interoperability requirements and procedures. The first of such acts was introduced in June 2023 and mandates Member States to report on national practices for access to metering and consumption data, using a common role model, by July 2025. The implementation of this European mandate offers the opportunity to reflect on the experience accumulated at the national level, share the lessons learnt and discuss the challenges associated with the increasing volume of data made available by smart meters and the new functionalities requested by the players active in the energy market and beyond.

On 12 February 2025, the Florence School of Regulation organised a workshop at Vlerick Business School in Brussels on “Energy consumers data management models: different pathways to reach the same destination?”, gathering relevant DSOs, TSOs and data exchange platforms from nine European countries. [2]

During the workshop, researchers of the FSR presented their preliminary findings about national data management models’ classification, cost structure and recovery, performance monitoring, governance arrangements, handling of more granular validated data, and support of near-real time data exchange. Experts participating in the workshop had the opportunity to react and discuss the findings, further elaborating on the contributions they had made in the preparatory interviews ahead of the meeting.

The insights collected during the workshop and the preparatory interviews are now being revised by the FSR team and will feed into a report on “Conceptual, economic, human-centred, and regulatory knowledge about energy data-sharing infrastructures”. The publication of the report is expected later in 2025 and is part of the deliverables of EDDIE, a Horizon Europe research project that aims to establish a decentralized, distributed, open-source Data Space. To do that, the project is developing and deploying two separate frameworks:

• the European Distributed Data Infrastructure for Energy (EDDIE) to significantly reduce data integration costs, allowing energy service companies to operate and compete seamlessly in a unified European market;
• the Administrative Interface for In-house Data Access (AIIDA) to ensure secure and reliable access to valuable real-time data based on customer consent.

If you want to know more about the FSR work within EDDIE, please, read our previous blog post “A European distributed data-sharing infrastructure for enabling innovative energy services”.

[1] According to the Directive (EU) 2019/944, ‘interoperability’ means, in the context of smart metering, the ability of two or more energy or communication networks, systems, devices, applications or components to interwork to exchange and use information in order to perform required functions (Art. 2 (24)).

[2] The workshop was organized in the context of the Vlerick DSO Chair and the Horizon Europe EDDIE project. The Vlerick DSO Chair is a research partnership between Vlerick Business School and Fluvius, the DSO in Flanders (Belgium).