Delivering Market-wide Half-Hourly Settlement (MHHS) regulatory reform for multiple UK energy suppliers

Oaklin is known for its track record of helping UK energy suppliers to make sense of regulatory complexity and deliver their most impactful and critical change programmes. One of the biggest regulatory change topics this year is MHHS, with every B2B and B2C energy supplier in the country simultaneously sprinting to implement new capabilities ahead of Ofgem's qualification deadline. We are helping multiple UK energy suppliers deliver MHHS at scale and at pace, giving us the unique opportunity to offer tightly-focused delivery assurance to market participants seeking to increase stakeholder confidence and reduce risk. At the same time, we remain engaged with the broader market to compile our anonymised MHHS delivery cost model, share delivery best practices and demystify resulting competitive advantage.

At its simplest, MHHS finally starts to unlock significant value from major investments in smart metering and big data by enabling the true end-to-end flow of half-hourly (HH) consumption data through to billing and settlement. Until now, energy consumed on a HH basis was still settled against legacy consumption profiles as if it was non half-hourly (NHH) - limiting UK energy suppliers' ability to unlock the benefits of the HH customer journey. This has been an issue we've watched closely in the years since we became known to suppliers for leading the fastest and most effective smart metering deliveries in the UK market.

The introduction of MHHS and its 70% shorter settlement timetable has required UK energy suppliers to reacquaint themselves with "how and where" settlement fits into their organisation's value chain - from aggregate demand profiling, to energy trading, to financing the spread between energy consumed and purchased at each half-hour interval. We have been working with our customers to optimise as-is and to-be value chains to both pinpoint MHHS impacts and identify opportunities to realise returns on previous investment.

For many UK energy suppliers, the renewed focus on settlement has also drawn attention to technical debt deep within legacy IT estates. Companies that have invested in modern, modular systems with scalable storage and service-oriented architectures are on the fast track to compliance and benefits realisation, while those with heavily customised systems on legacy platforms are having more challenging conversations.

Ultimately, MHHS will enable a new generation of HH energy products, and leading UK energy suppliers are already starting to design and plan their rollouts. UK energy suppliers that focus solely on compliance will soon find themselves defending dwindling market share rather than capitalising on their smart metering and MHHS investments as a springboard to gain customers from lagging competitors.

Over the coming weeks, we will share additional insights on how Oaklin's MHHS-specific offerings are helping UK energy suppliers to raise their game:

• Regulatory delivery health check - is your programme on track to safely deliver timely qualification?
• Benefits realisation - does your organisation understand "how and where" MHHS fits into the end-to-end value chain, and where it can unlock additional value?
• Technology roadmap - how can your organisation reduce technical debt and innovate to unlock ROI?
• Product and service roadmap - is your organisation on track to both defend existing market share and win net new customers from competitors?