We’ve had another extraordinary year in 2021 with progress on Climate Finance, Open Energy, and the Green Economy. I want to thank you for your support, especially given how tough this year has been for so many. I hope that you have as good a break as possible over the festive season and look forward to connecting with you in 2022.
Below are some highlights of our year, as well as an outline of our plans for the coming year, including Developing the Icebreaker constellation, Icebreaking-as-a-Service, Climate Finance, Open Transport and Open Energy. In the interim, if you would like to join our growing community, please do consider engaging as a supporter.
Best wishes,
Gavin Starks, Founder
Select highlights
Based on everyone’s feedback, we’ve created a new summary of what we do.
We’re creating a web of net-zero data – connecting financial, engineering and environmental data to help inform net-zero decisions. Much of this data is restricted, so we’re enabling this web by creating policies and guardrails that ensure data is comparable, machine-readable and trusted. To achieve this we are working across industries and governments.
Building Open Energy—a web of energy data
Working with industry and government, Open Energy is co-developing ways to make it easy to find and use energy data. At the end of last year, Open Energy won UKRI’s Modernising Energy Data Access competition and, having completed Beta by July 2021 is now in Pilot phase. Development is being driven through industry-defined use cases: electric vehicle charging points and flexibility markets (https://energy.icebreakerone.org/2021/12/01/open-energy-pilot-use-cases/).
We led a partnership with Arup and Hippo Digital to deliver the Energy Data Visibility Project (commissioned by BEIS). The project took an industry-led, consultative, and collaborative approach to test and validate metadata standards, glossaries and test a prototype solution with the energy community, and feeds into the technical standards element of Open Energy.
Growing support for a web of net-zero data
We were selected from over 4,000 proposals to present at COP26, speaking to a standing-room-only crowd on the power of energy data sharing to decarbonise the built world.
At OpenUK’s COP26 sustainability day, Lord Maude of Horsham said: “Icebreaker One are developing our national data infrastructure. It’s as important as our roads, rail, water and broadband networks”. Icebreaker One later won their Sustainability Award in the OpenUK Awards.
Expanding our global reach, we were invited to partner with the Green Powered Future Mission. Its secretariat includes China, Italy and the UK, with the UK (BEIS) taking the lead on Data and Digitalisation for System Integration: how to accelerate the digitalisation of energy systems. We are taking the learnings of Open Energy forward into this decade-long initiative.
Data infrastructure for climate finance
Our work to develop a data-sharing infrastructure for the insurance sector produced an array of research and solutions. SERI’s expert teams developed Standard for Environment, Risk and Insurance, with foundational work on the principles and best practices recommended for the SERI Governance Framework, and a use case of a Climate-Ready Building Passport to explore how a data standard could catalyse Net Zero across the insurance and built world.
The Climate Financial Risk Forum (CFRF) is an industry forum jointly convened by the UK financial regulators (FCA, PRA) and the Bank of England to build capacity and share best practices—to advance the sector’s responses to the financial risks from climate change. The CFRF set up four technical working groups on disclosure, scenario analysis, risk management and innovation. Icebreaker One is featured as a case study in its Innovation track.
What next?
Developing the Icebreaker constellation
Throughout our work we help to connect the people who will deliver our Net Zero Future.
If you would like to join this growing community, please consider joining https://icebreakerone.org/supporters/
For a summary of our commercial constellation, please see https://icebreakerone.org/constellation/
Icebreaking-as-a-Service
We’ve launched a new service based on Icebreaker One’s characteristic way of bringing sectors together to break through problems and deliver results. We’ll be running a series of silo-breaking workshops on behalf of organisations in the new year which we aim to lead to a summit that convenes and catalyses development, and launches codesigned impact programmes.
Climate Finance
We will continue and expand our work on Climate Finance, including on SERI, with the Future of Sustainable Data Alliance (FoSDA) and the Climate Financial Risk Forum (CFRF).
Open Transport
Open Energy is the first service to use the IB1 Trust Framework. Working with the existing pioneers in the transport space, our next cluster in development is Open Transport. https://icebreakerone.org/constellation/open-transport
Open Energy – UK and international
We will continue to develop Open Energy, bringing new members on board in the UK, and forging international partnerships.