Another dull title, you can see where I get my stories about being the boring guy at dinner parties. But give me a chance…
The pace of regulatory change is the pace of industry change, it is the limiting factor in our move to Net Zero and to providing better services to consumers. It’s important.
Ever since privatisation in the 1990s the pace of change has been determined by a combination of the desire for change and the many opportunities that our regulatory system provides to slow down that change.
New technologies are changing this and this week I’ve seen two great examples of how the world is changing.
Applying generative AI to regulation is the first game changer. We have been feeding thousands of pages of regulation into an engine and have been amazed at the answers that it is able to provide us with. This tech can go even further, and we asked it to generate new regulations for us. It did an amazing job we can then ask it to improve and change the regulation and it does. It can even test regulations in the same way that we test programming code.
No more months in committees reviewing and drafting new regulations – we just say what we want, and the system does the rest. Amazing.
The second comes in the way that we define the data and messages that operate the energy markets. There are hundreds of data and message specifications that govern the millions of interactions that manage our markets every day. Everything from switching a supplier, to arranging a new meter, to updating a customer’s address.
Managing the updates to this specification and then updating every system in the market ecosystem with the new spec is a massive job. Many projects that everyone wants to do are stuck in the queue behind these mandatory regulatory changes.
We are exploring how new technologies can expedite this, better management of the repository and then the potential to automatically generate and test the code that handles the messages is within our grasp.
Accelerating the pace of energy change will come from mass adoption of low carbon technologies, but they will be hindered unless we can also unlock the pace of regulatory change.
