Smart Energy Code

Regulator guidance Great Britain

The Smart Energy Code is the answer to a question the UK energy report keeps returning to: Britain clearly mandated something in energy data, so what was it?

The SEC is a multiparty code binding suppliers, networks and service users to common rules for smart metering, with the Data Communications Company licensed as the single operator of the national communications layer. The technical specifications underneath it — DUIS for the user interface, GBCS for the message set, SMETS2 for the meters, SMKI for the key infrastructure — define an XML web service that is genuinely machine-readable and genuinely closed.

• Access by party status, not by credential - to reach smart-meter data you become a SEC party in the appropriate role. There is no developer signup, no API key, and no self-serve path.
• A monopoly by design - the DCC is licensed to be the only operator. That is a deliberate policy choice about reliability and interoperability, and it is the opposite of a competitive API market.
• Infrastructure, not portability - the code governs how meter traffic moves between licensed parties. It confers no right on a consumer to send their own data to a third party.

What it produced, and what it did not

The State of UK Energy APIs found something counterintuitive: eighteen of twenty-six UK organizations carry a live, verified mandate — more than Australia’s fourteen — and only four publish a consumer-data API, against Australia’s thirteen.

Britain has more mandates and a fraction of the consumer APIs, because its mandates were pointed at pipes.

The consequence is a market where consented consumer data had to be built as a business rather than delivered as a right. Hildebrand and n3rgy exist to obtain a customer’s authorisation and broker their smart-meter data onward, and they are why Britain leads the entire energy study on consent_identity at 46% — more than double mandated Australia and fifteen times the United States.

Great Britain does have the legal machinery for a consumer energy data right. DESNZ ran a call for evidence on an energy smart-data scheme that closed in March 2025 with no government response, and no secondary legislation has followed under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. The instrument exists and has not been used.

Read alongside Ofgem’s Data Best Practice Guidance, which is the other half of Britain’s answer — an open-data obligation aimed at network operational data, and the reason the DNOs out-publish every mandated market in the study. Britain did not decline to mandate. It mandated the infrastructure and the network data, and left the customer’s own data alone.