Master Data Management
for Energy & Renewables

It’s a critical time for the Energy & Renewables sector. The heat is on to find new ways to improve efficiency, transparency, and customer experience – and data is your greatest asset as you explore these solutions. There’s certainly no shortage of it: the sector is generating more than ever before, with a combination of customer data, asset data, and aggregation creating a deluge of information. Plus, in 2025 the default frequency for smart meter readings will be every 30 minutes. 

Can you be confident that your data is accurate? How do you know if your data-driven solutions — from customer profiling to consumption analytics — are fuelled by reliable information, or are being diluted (even damaged) by poor-quality data? 

The answer is Master Data Management (MDM) — a combination of technology and governance that will make sure your data is always up-to-date, accessible, and reliable. With effective MDM, you will always have a ‘Golden Record’ available to explore myriad opportunities with data. It can be applied across multiple domains, mastering people, products, and locations. 

What is a Golden Record?

The Golden Record, is a single version of the truth across all of your data — a central, reliable source of information, wherever and whenever you access it. By addressing how your data is managed throughout its lifecycle, and making it centrally available, MDM creates a ‘Golden Record’ that can power a range of data possibilities for energy and renewables organisations like yours.

Is Your Data Holding You Back?

Imagine the impact of unreliable data on your data-driven solutions, from customer profiling to consumption analytics. Inaccurate information can dilute or even damage your efforts.

Benefits of MDM for Energy & Renewables

• Boost Efficiency by 30% with accurate data for tasks like half-hourly meter readings.
• Reduce OFGEM Fines for inaccurate forecasting with improved data quality.
• Enhance Customer Satisfaction by personalising experiences with better customer data insights.
• Optimise Asset Management through data-driven maintenance strategies, extending asset life and reducing costs.
• Improve Regulatory Compliance with consistent, high-quality data readily available for reporting.

Overcome Common Data Challenges

• Break down data silos and integrate disparate systems for seamless data flow.
• MDM streamlines data integration after mergers and acquisitions.
• Ensure the accuracy of aggregated data with robust data management practices.
• Process vast amounts of smart meter data quickly to generate actionable insights.
• MDM combats data degradation with ongoing data quality control measures.
• MDM fosters a data-centric culture within your organisation.

Why should the Energy and Renewables sector use MDM?

When your master data is reliable and accurate, your business can unlock a host of commercial benefits, and accelerate business transformation. 

Trust

By creating a single source of data, MDM improves data consistency across departments. This empowers everyone to use data and, in turn, take accountability for it. 

Efficiency

With accurate, reliable data, you can explore more ways to improve efficiency – such as accurate half-hourly metering. Speed With the right data, you can be fully informed to act fast: such as being in the right place, with the right tools, at the right time, when problems occur on your grid. 

Forecasts

Good data equals more accurate energy demand forecasts, for a better understanding of how to meet your customers’ energy needs – and subsequently less OFGEM fines for inaccurate forecasting. 

Reporting

By taking a data-first approach with MDM, you can make sure you’re always ready with high-quality data to support compliance, regardless of the reporting required: whether it’s OFGEM, Scope 3 or something else entirely. 

Insight

By collating data from disparate sources, MDM gives you deeper, more detailed insight: from pinpointing meter locations to identifying empty properties on your grid. 

Asset management 

With MDM, you can collate data, including location, on your assets, such as turbines, solar panels, and meters, for more efficient cataloguing and maintenance. Asset MDM can also be the first step to efficient asset monitoring, putting data quality policies into practice to fuel future solutions. 

Customer experience

The more you understand your customers, the more you can tailor their experience, creating data-driven experiences that are both personal and convenient.

What data obstacles does MDM help Energy and Renewables to overcome?

MDM is a combination of technology and governance. By creating real operational change, it can help you overcome some of the biggest obstacles that you face as you explore data-driven opportunities. 

Legacy technology

From old on-premise platforms to spreadsheets and silos, legacy data technology is preventing access to data and damaging its quality, thanks to a lack of integration between systems and departments. 

M&A

Post-M&A data integration can feel so complicated that it’s often left unchecked for years, but this just worsens the problem, creating entrenched data silos that make it difficult to access data where and when it’s needed.

Data aggregation

With high volumes of raw data being processed and summarised through data aggregation, data accuracy is more important than ever – and equally difficult to determine. To keep track of aggregate data quality, you need robust data management in place from inception. 

Data volumes

With the introduction of Smart meters, you’re collecting vast volumes of data at high velocity. That data is only useful if it can be processed quickly and converted into information to drive actions and insights, whether manual or automated. 

Data drift

Many an organisation has implemented a data quality exercise, only to see the quality of their data degrade in the following months. This ‘drift’ can see poor quality data introduced back into cleansed data, creating confusion, complication and even non-compliance. 

Poor data literacy

One of the biggest obstacles to successful data management in the energy sector is poor data literacy: a lack of understanding and appreciation of data across the business. Technology alone can’t fix it: it takes a cultural shift, and MDM is a good starting point.

Case study: How a global leader in solar development and management used MDM to support their solar farm maintenance 

The goal

A global leader in solar development and management had ambitious growth plans to increase its solar energy production from 2GW to 10GW – enough to power about 2 million households. 

The solution

As part of this plan, they needed to first implement MDM to support the building and maintenance of a solar farm: a task that needs the employment of various types of specialist personnel and specialist materials. Agile’s 42-day delivery ensured that the businesses got a quick ROI, with a clear understanding of the data they needed. They then extended the work to include more domains, including the optimisation of their sales pipeline and asset management. 

The result

They were able to manage their business infrastructure, identify cost savings for resources and materials, and improve health and safety – a key performance metric for them.

Case study: How a leading renewable energy firm cleaned their master data for reliable financial forecasting 

The goal

One of the world’s largest renewable energy firms, needed a better way to manage multiple data sets – and a faster, better way to analyse and compare data. 

The solution

Agile devised a solution to implement Semarchy’s MDM toolset along with data management initiatives, including the development of data stewardship processes and data quality initiatives. Integration exercises enabled the platform to seamlessly connect with existing software and systems, followed by rigorous testing throughout deployment to ensure that the platform was ready for widespread use. 

The result

The organisation are now able to access the data they need across their supplier base, geographies and time periods, whenever they need it – with full confidence that the data is up-to-date and accurate