Why we built GridOptic

– 1.5m published records from all six Great Britain distribution networks, joined into one schema, plus national registers from NESO and DESNZ.

– 405 grid supply points form the spatial backbone, so a record from one network sits alongside a record from another and means the same thing.

– Assess a site, map the country, rank a shortlist, forecast revenue, track the index, read the queue — one evidence base, asked different questions.

– Every figure carries a confidence rating and traces to a source row, so you know whether to act on it, and can show your workings when someone asks.

An asset developer sizing a battery, a VPP operator deciding where to grow a portfolio, an investor testing a case — all of them start with the same question. Is this a good place to put a flexible asset, what can it do there, and how much can I rely on the answer?

Answering it properly means pulling together capacity at the substation, headroom on the network, what the local network has been buying, what it says it will need in future years, what is already queued ahead of you, and what similar contracts have actually cleared for. That evidence exists. It is published. It is simply published across six different networks and several national registers, each shaped by its own obligations, formats and timescales.

So the honest position today is that the question is answerable — but only by someone willing to spend weeks across six portals and several registers, learning each schema, reconciling names by hand, and building a spreadsheet that starts going stale the moment it is finished. Most teams do exactly that. Many do it again for every site.

That is the problem GridOptic exists to solve.

It is worth saying plainly, because it often gets lost: the raw material is genuinely there.

Between them, the six GB distribution networks have put more than 1.5 million records into the public domain — the physical shape of the network, where capacity is available, what has been procured, what services are needed, what has been instructed, and what is waiting in the connection queue.

That is a substantial act of transparency, and it has happened quickly. Each network publishes to its own portal, on its own schedule, in the format that suits its systems. That variation is not a failing — it is the natural result of six independent organisations meeting their obligations in the way that works for them. Nobody's remit is to make it comparable across Great Britain.

That is the gap we set out to fill.

Making six publications behave like one dataset is most of the engineering, and it is the part that cannot be skipped.

The same grid supply point is named differently by different networks, and differently again between a procurement register and a headroom file. Delivery years appear as 2024/25 in one place and 2023-2024 in another. A site sits within a grid supply point — where the transmission system hands over to a distribution network — and that boundary decides which capacity, which requirement and which queue actually apply. Two sites a few miles apart can face entirely different answers.

GridOptic resolves every network's label to a single canonical identity, across a registry of 405 grid supply points, and keeps the original source name alongside the canonical one. Where a record cannot be matched confidently, it is kept and marked as such rather than quietly dropped — so coverage is something you can see, not something you have to assume.

On top of the six networks sit the national registers that change the picture: NESO's TEC register for the transmission and large embedded connection queue, NESO demand pathways, DESNZ's renewable planning database, each network's future energy scenarios, and Capacity Market data. Different sources, different cadences, one joined view.

The data refreshes on a schedule matched to how each publisher actually behaves — dispatch checked daily, substation data weekly, the NESO queue every three days, future-energy scenarios quarterly — rather than on one blanket timer that is either wasteful or stale. Every payload fetched from a network portal is archived with a checksum, so any number on screen can be traced back to the file it came from.

Joined-up data is only worth something if you can ask it questions. The platform is a set of tools, each answering one that actually comes up.

Assess one location — Site Advisor. Give it a postcode, coordinates or a known network asset. It comes back with the three technology options for that site — battery storage, generation, demand-side response — each scored and ranked, with the reasoning shown: what the local requirement is, what headroom exists in the relevant direction, what is queued ahead of you, how long comparable connections have taken, and what similar contracts have cleared for. It is the decision brief for one site, assembled in minutes rather than over a fortnight.

Two details matter more than the score. Where the published requirement belongs to a wider area rather than your specific site, the tool says so rather than implying precision it does not have. And where there is no stated local requirement at all, it declines to show an earnings figure — it will not put a plausible-looking number against a site that has nowhere to sell.

See the country — the map. Every grid supply point in Great Britain, rendered geographically, with available capacity and how constrained each area is. Because boundaries decide outcomes, seeing them is often faster than reading them. The map also reports how many supply points it could plot against how many it knows about, per network — so the gaps in the picture are part of the picture.

Rank a geography — Opportunity Scanner. Instead of testing sites one at a time, set the brief — technology, capacity, region, timing — and compare across the whole network at once. Results come back tiered as immediate, emerging or watch, built from headroom, queue congestion, constraint severity, forecast demand growth and flexibility value. Locations with no real signal behind them are pushed down the list rather than sitting mid-table on default values, which is the difference between a shortlist you can act on and one you have to re-check.

Put a number on it — Revenue Forecaster. For a technology and capacity at a location, over a horizon you choose, it returns an evidence-rated annual revenue range per MW: a case built from contracted evidence, a case weighted by stated future requirement, and a downside. Behind it sits the evidence table — the actual contracts and dispatch records the figures rest on. Ask it about Great Britain as a whole and it answers per MW as a benchmark; it will not sum regions into a national total that nobody could actually earn.

Track the market — GO-LFI. The GridOptic Local Flexibility Index tracks what flexibility has cleared for, by network, technology and delivery year. Availability and utilisation are calculated separately and shown separately, because blending them hides which one is moving. Where evidence is absent the cell is empty rather than zero — an important distinction, since a zero on a chart reads as "worth nothing" when the truth is "not yet known".

Each cell carries two independent star ratings: how confident we are in the price, and how confident we are that a requirement exists at all. A strong price signal against a weak requirement is a very different proposition from the reverse, and one number could never tell you which you were looking at.

Read the queue — Connection Queue. The national register filtered to what matters to you: how much capacity is queued, how much of it holds a firm connection offer versus an indicative one, by connection year and technology. Competition and timing become evidence rather than a late surprise.

Open the evidence — Market Evidence and Network Explorer. Every number is backed by searchable contracts, dispatch records, requirements, curtailment and connection data, and every supply point has a full profile behind it — firm capacity, headroom in each direction, published constraints, queue pressure. Nothing is a black box.

Take it into the room — packs and saved sites. Sites you are working on can be kept together with their evidence, and a location's assessment can be exported as a pack for an investment committee or a procurement conversation, with the sources attached.

Joined-up data creates a temptation to present everything with equal confidence. We don't.

Evidence is graded on an explicit floor. A benchmark rating means a genuinely deep record behind that cell — a substantial number of priced contracts across several distinct providers. Indicative means real evidence, but thinner. Insufficient means we will show you what exists and decline to dress it up. The thresholds are fixed and applied the same way everywhere, so the rating means the same thing in every region.

The practical effect is that the platform will tell you when it does not know. Empty rather than zero. A stated requirement marked as area-wide rather than site-specific. A coverage note where supply points could not be matched. A network where a particular field is not published at all, named on the coverage page rather than averaged into invisibility.

This is not modesty. For anyone taking a case to an investment committee or a lender, a number you can trace and qualify is worth considerably more than a confident one you cannot.

The picture improves as publication improves, and that is a job for the industry rather than for any one party.

Every network here publishes more than it did a few years ago, and the direction of travel is clearly toward greater transparency. As richer detail is published — more consistent identifiers, more complete timestamps, more forward-looking requirements — it flows straight through into better answers for everyone building and operating assets on the network.

We would like to be useful in that. Working with published data at this scale shows quickly which fields matter downstream, and we are glad to share what we see with networks who find it helpful. Greater transparency serves everyone: it helps networks attract the flexibility they need, and it helps asset owners bring it forward with confidence.

Have a site in mind? Start with Site Advisor — a postcode is enough to get the whole picture back.

Looking for sites rather than checking one? Start with the map to get oriented, then Opportunity Scanner to turn a region into a ranked shortlist.

Testing a case? Revenue Forecaster for the range and the evidence beneath it, GO-LFI for how the location sits against the rest of Great Britain.

Whichever you start with, every figure traces back to a published record, with its source, its date and its confidence attached.

We hope you find it useful. We are building this for the people who develop, operate and finance flexible assets on the GB network, and the fastest way for it to get better is to hear from you.

Tell us what is working and what is not at [email protected]. If there is something the platform should do and does not yet, we would genuinely like to know — [email protected] goes straight onto the roadmap discussion.