West Monroe & Arcadia
Jason Price is a director of industry strategy and client development in West Monroe’s Energy and Utility practice, based in New York City. He is a graduate of the NYU Clean Energy program and host of the Power Perspectives podcast on Energy Central.
Ben White is Director of Utility Partnerships at Arcadia, where he works with utilities and regulators to advance data access policies and technology in support of clean energy goals. He previously worked at Plaid and the Aspen Institute.
With recently released guidelines on grid sharing in the NARUC Grid Data Sharing Playbook, the spotlight is once again on the national movement toward utility data democratization. Access to utility data such as meter data on customer usage patterns, billing data, grid capacity data, interconnection data, DER data, and more has been shown to accelerate clean energy development and technology innovations in the utility industry.
Data access guidelines in banking and health care helped establish new business practices, business models, and market innovations that serve as a model for how the utility industry, vendors, and customers can benefit from easier access to such data.
For years, state utility regulators have wrangled on how best to approach making utility data available. Accessibility must be practical, in a way that ensures data integrity and security, is inexpensive to make available and maintain, sufficient to be actionable, and better informs utility, vendor, and customer decision making. Each state and regulatory bodies have been pursuing their own methods and means in determining what data, in what form, and in what manner the data would be made available, if at all.