We’ve published a digital tool that is lowering the cost of regulation

Correspondence and other

Publication date

Industry sector

  • Supply and Retail Market
  • Distribution Network
  • Offshore Transmission Network
  • Transmission Network
  • Generation and Wholesale Market

What cost are we reducing?


Ofgem requests a lot of data from market participants to help us as we make decisions about how to regulate the energy market.


Poor data makes it take longer and cost more to make these decisions, both for us and the companies, so we are investing in reducing this cost burden.

How are we Reducing Cost?

We have collaborated with energy companies to develop our ofgem_validation_tool. This digital tool provides an automated report of data issues.

It identifies issues in data, such as missing fields of information or data fields with incorrect datatypes e.g. numeric instead of text.


It also identifies issues that we call “business rule” errors, such as checking if submitted numeric values exceed allowable value ranges e.g. it might be non-sensible for particular data numbers to be outside the range 0 to 100.


It works on text too. If data should only contain words from a specific set of acceptable words, it checks that this is the case. e.g. it automatically checks that data matches one of the region names from a list of all the distributor regions in the country.


Companies can now download our tool and ensure their data meets these basic standards before they send it to Ofgem. This lowers their costs by making it absolutely clear what we need from them; it reduces the need to send data back and forth between us and; it makes data processing quicker for Ofgem. All of these things lower the cost burden of regulation.


Can I access this tool?


Anyone can access this tool!


It is available through our new gitlab space. Simply follow the instructions within and you can test it from the practice data we have provided. This will help you understand how to use it on your own data.
The ofgem_validation_tool has been tested and reviewed in alignment with Ofgem’s disclosure control strategy prior to its release.


Why are we excited about open-sourcing?


The ofgem_validation_tool is the first tool that we have made available as open-source information. We are already seeing huge reductions in the time it takes for data to be processed. It is helping us minimise the cost of energy regulation.
We hope this will be the first of many tools we make available....watch this gitlab space!