Down the Line

Stand on the clearfell above Glenmeadhanach, where the lorry in the last article loaded its spruce, and look down the glen. A line of steel towers is going up across the haughs, each taller than anything else for miles: a new 400,000-volt line, built to carry power south. On the ridge across the glen, the turbines of the estate's wind farm are standing still, although the wind is strong enough to lean on. At the foot of the glen is a substation behind a palisade fence, and beyond it a row of houses, among them 3 Station Cottages, whose frame was sawn from spruce like the load on that lorry. Far to the south, in a flat in Glasgow, someone fills a kettle and switches it on.

Now ask some ordinary questions:

• Where did the electricity in that kettle come from?
• Why are the turbines standing still on a windy evening, and who is paying for it?
• Who decided that the new line would come down this glen, and what does the glen get in return?
• Who owns the line, the turbines and the ground under them?
• Why might a house in the glen pay more to keep warm than a flat in the city?
• When can the new houses at the foot of the glen be connected, and what will their heat pumps do to the substation?
• If the lights go out, who needs to know first, and will anyone have the data to find out why?

Each question has an answer, and each answer is held by someone different: the wind farm's operator; the transmission company that owns the new line; the distribution company that owns the substation and the wires to the houses; the National Energy System Operator (NESO), which keeps supply and demand in balance; Ofgem; Elexon, which settles who owes whom for every half-hour; the household's supplier; the Data Communications Company, which runs the smart meter network; the Scottish Government's Energy Consents Unit; the council; Registers of Scotland; the estate, which leases the ground for the turbines and grants rights for the line; and the community fund that the wind farm pays into. Each keeps its own records, in its own vocabulary, in systems bought to do one job.

Electricity adds a twist that timber and milk did not. The food article found that nobody can say which farm's milk is in a particular carton, because the creamery pools it. The grid pools everything. The power in that kettle did not come from any particular turbine. It came from the system, and every statement about where electricity came from is a claim about a pool. That makes the data about it matter more, not less.

This is the fifth article in a series on knowledge graphs, after pieces for investigators and analysts (Joining the Dots), on the land question (Who Owns the Glen?), on the food system (Field to Fork and Back Again) and on forests (The Wood and the Trees). Each has argued that the RDF model is versatile enough for a domain that a dozen organisations describe in a dozen ways. This one takes the argument to the industry where that versatility has been tested longest, and where, it turns out, the network engineers got there first. It also carries on with what the last article called data-centric architecture, in Dave McComb's sense: the view that the trouble we have with interoperability, master data and data governance is largely what application-centric systems have left behind.

A short history of the wires

Britain's first electricity pylon went up in 1928 at Bonnyfield, near Falkirk (nationalgrid.com). It belonged to the Central Electricity Board, which the Electricity (Supply) Act 1926 had created to build a national grid, and its design came from a competition judged by the architect Sir Reginald Blomfield (blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk). The Highlands came later. In 1943 Parliament set up the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, the project of Tom Johnston, to build hydro schemes and bring power to the glens. Its motto, Neart nan gleann, means "power from the glens" (ssen-transmission.co.uk). Johnston told the Commons that surplus power would be sold to the national grid to defray the cost of distribution in remote rural areas, and that the Board would be responsible for the economic development and social improvement of the north (en.wikipedia.org). The balance between town and country was built into the wires from the start.

When the industry was privatised under the Electricity Act 1989, the Board's transmission duties passed to what is now SSEN Transmission. Since then the direction of travel has reversed. The grid of the twentieth century carried power from big stations near the coalfields and the cities out to the homes around them. Today much of Britain's power is made in the hills and off the coasts of Scotland, and it has to travel south. Scotland generated a record 38.5 terawatt hours of renewable electricity in 2025, most of it from wind, and exported 20.8 TWh more than it imported (gov.scot).

The wires have not kept up. When the network cannot carry what the turbines produce, NESO pays wind farms to stop and gas-fired stations nearer the demand to start. The National Audit Office put the cost of these constraint payments at £1.9 billion in 2025-26, and warned that it could rise to £7.8 billion by 2030 without concerted action (nao.org.uk). An analysis by Montel found that the wind power switched off in Scotland in the first half of 2025 could have met the electricity demand of every Scottish household for those six months (shetnews.co.uk). That is why the turbines on the ridge are still.

Like forests, grids run on long cycles. A transmission tower can stand for most of a century. The software that records it will be replaced several times before it comes down. The assets outlive the systems that describe them, which was the argument of the last article and is the starting point of this one.

One grid, four questions

The themes this time are generation, transmission and use, and the places where all three happen.

Generation. Scotland's ambitions are large. The Scottish Government wants 20 gigawatts of onshore wind by 2030 (gov.scot), and the ScotWind leasing round of 2022 promised a great deal more offshore. Storage is the other half of the story. SSE's Coire Glas pumped storage scheme in the Great Glen was one of 16 long-duration storage projects on Ofgem's provisional list for cap-and-floor support in June 2026 (sserenewables.com). Wood is part of it too, which brings the last article back in. The UK imported 9.8 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2025 (cdn.forestresearch.gov.uk), and Drax, whose Yorkshire power station burns them, will appear again below. And the Energy Independence Bill, introduced at Westminster on 4 November 2026, would end new oil and gas licences (gov.uk), a decision that matters more in Aberdeen than anywhere else in Britain.

Transmission. To carry the power south, the transmission companies are building at a pace not seen since the Hydro Board. SSEN Transmission's programme to 2030 includes around 300 miles of new 400 kV overhead line (ssen-transmission.co.uk). One of the lines, from Beauly near Inverness to Peterhead, went to Scottish Ministers for consent in October 2025 (ssen-transmission.co.uk), By April 2026 it had drawn 2,396 objections from the public, and a line from Kintore to Tealing more than 10,000 (gov.scot). Offshore, Eastern Green Link 2 will run 505 kilometres from Peterhead to Drax, much of it under the North Sea, carrying 2 gigawatts from 2029 (energy-pedia.com).

Pylons are where national need meets local landscape, and the argument is always about who carries the burden. Part of the UK Government's answer is the Bill Discount Scheme: households within 500 metres of new or significantly upgraded transmission infrastructure will get £250 a year off their electricity bills for ten years, with payments expected to start in the first half of 2027 (gov.uk). The announcement spoke of "rural communities receiving hundreds of pounds in their pockets for hosting vital infrastructure" (gov.uk). The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 has also changed how objections are handled in Scotland. Since 18 February 2026, an objection from the council no longer triggers an automatic public inquiry into a new line or power station, and a reporter decides what procedure is needed (gov.scot).

Use. Demand is changing shape. Heat pumps and electric cars will add to it, and data centres are adding fastest. Contracted demand for connections to the grid rose from 41 GW in November 2024 to 125 GW in June 2025, with data centres driving much of the increase (knightfrank.co.uk). In January 2026 the UK Government named Lanarkshire as the UK's fifth AI Growth Zone, around DataVita's data centre site in Airdrie, with £8.2 billion of private investment and a community fund of up to £543 million over 15 years (gov.uk).

Old demand matters as well. Many homes in the Highlands and islands are off the gas grid and heat with storage heaters, which were switched to their cheap hours by a radio signal, the Radio Teleswitch Service. The signal went off for good at the end of June 2026, when around 33,000 of those meters were still in place in Scotland, out of 100,000 across the UK (prod.news.stv.tv).

Places: the glen and the city. The infrastructure is mostly rural and the demand mostly urban. The turbines, lines, substations and batteries go where the land is. The kettles, trams and data halls are where the people are. The glen hosts, the city consumes, and the glen is often the poorer of the two when it comes to keeping warm. In 2024, 38% of households in remote rural Scotland were in fuel poverty, against 29% across Scotland as a whole (changeworks.org.uk).

Three answers are on the table. The first is community benefit. The Energy Independence Bill would require new onshore wind and solar projects over 5 MW to sign community benefit agreements with their host communities, at a minimum, on the government's current thinking, of £5,000 per megawatt per year for wind and £700 for solar, with a register covering all of Great Britain (gov.uk). The second is ownership. Scotland has a target of 2 GW of community and locally owned energy by 2030, and stood at about 1.15 GW at the end of 2025 (energysavingtrust.org.uk), though the Scottish Community Coalition on Energy points out that only about 0.1 GW of that is truly community-owned (communitylandscotland.org.uk). The third is price. The UK Government considered splitting the British wholesale market into zones, which would have meant different prices where power is made and where it is used, and in July 2025 decided against it: "We have therefore decided not to implement zonal pricing" (gov.uk). Johnston would have recognised the argument. A single national price is a decision about the balance between town and country, just as the cross-subsidy in the Hydro Board's Act was.

Every one of these questions is asked of the same wires. Each is answered by different people, with different data, under different rules.

The grid already speaks RDF

As in the earlier articles, the basic parts are short sentences of subject, verb and object. A slice of the glen might read:

Turbine T14 — is part of —> Glenmeadhanach Wind Farm

Glenmeadhanach Wind Farm — is connected to —> Glen Substation

Glen Line — crosses —> title QED00001

Meter point 1012345678901 — serves —> 3 Station Cottages

3 Station Cottages — lies within 500 metres of —> Glen Line

Connection application APP-0101 — relies on —> title QED00001

(All invented, though title QED00001 is the estate's title from the land article.) Semantic Arts' gist (github.com) does the same work here as in the food and forest articles:

• Parts (gist:isPartOf). The turbine is part of the wind farm.
• Connections (gist:isConnectedTo). The wind farm is connected to the substation. gist defines this as a peer-to-peer relationship, neither owning nor subordinate, and that is exactly right: a connection does not make the wind farm part of the transmission network, or the substation part of the wind farm.
• Places (gist:isGeoContainedIn). The houses lie within the glen.
• Ownership (gist:owns). The estate owns the land; the wind farm company owns the turbines; the transmission company owns the line, which crosses land it does not own.
• Measures (gist:Magnitude). Electricity is measured, not counted. A magnitude with its unit of measure lets "42 megawatt hours in the half-hour ending 07:30" carry its unit with it, instead of sitting as a bare number in a column whose heading somebody has to remember.

Here the electricity industry is ahead of the others in this series. For more than two decades it has maintained its own ontology, the Common Information Model (CIM), published by the International Electrotechnical Commission as the IEC 61970, 61968 and 62325 standards. It describes the network itself, from breakers and transformers to lines and how they connect, and in Europe it is exchanged as RDF. ENTSO-E, the association of Europe's transmission system operators, defines the Common Grid Model Exchange Standard (CGMES) as profiles of the CIM. Those profiles, and the newer Network Code profiles for the data that regional coordination centres exchange, are published as RDF vocabularies with their constraints written in SHACL, and ENTSO-E recommends Turtle because many of the constraints use SHACL's SPARQL-based checks (eepublicdownloads.entsoe.eu). Each operator's model of its own grid is merged with its neighbours' into a pan-European common grid model (eepublicdownloads.entsoe.eu). In the language of this series, that is a federation: each operator keeps its own model and publishes it in an agreed shape, and the common model is a view over all of them.

Statnett, which runs Norway's transmission system, has gone a long way towards treating this as a knowledge graph. Its power system data are held as CIM profiles in a triple store, and in 2022 it published cimsparql, an open-source library that runs SPARQL queries against them to feed its analysis models (datascience.statnett.no). With Graphwise, it is now running a research project called Talk2PowerSystem, which lets engineers question CIM knowledge graphs in natural language, with a large language model generating the SPARQL, and publishes its code openly (github.com). The reason given in a Statnett presentation in October 2025 will sound familiar to anyone in a technical organisation: power system data are getting more complex, and "the average experience of power engineers is dropping due to retirement" (docs.google.com). The same presentation notes that Statnett's enterprise information architect convenes ENTSO-E's working groups for CGMES and for the Network Code profiles. The standards and their heaviest users sit at the same table.

Britain is following. Since November 2025, the distribution network operators have published their long-term development statements, which describe their networks for anyone planning a connection, as CGMES models rather than spreadsheets and text files, following an Ofgem decision of 2022. NESO is pursuing wider exchange of CIM models through a change to the Grid Code, GC0139 (tneigroup.com).

So the network already speaks RDF, and can already be checked with SHACL. What does not speak it is everything around the network: the land it crosses, the consents and their conditions, the communities and their funds, the meters and the bills, and the forest the line runs through. That is where the trouble is.

A grid's history, like a forest's, is a series of events: energisation, faults, outages, switching, instructions to turn down, meter readings, estimates and corrections. With RDF 1.2's statements about statements, each can carry who said it and when: that a reading was estimated, that an instruction to turn down came from NESO at 19:02, that a protection setting was tested on a particular day.

Master data and the meter

The last article began the case for data-centric architecture with a forest that outlived its software. Electricity shows the cost of the alternative more starkly, because it has three problems that the industry spends fortunes on: interoperability, master data and governance. Seen from McComb's side, they are one problem. Each application defined its own data, so the same things (a meter point, a property, a transformer, a consignment of pellets) are described again and again in incompatible ways, and someone has to reconcile them afterwards.

Interoperability, added afterwards. Britain's first-generation smart meters, known as SMETS1, were installed before the national smart meter network existed, and ran on their suppliers' own systems. As a result, some lost their smart functions when the customer switched supplier. Fixing that meant migrating millions of meters onto the national network (smartdcc.co.uk). The second generation was designed for the shared network from the start. That is the difference between data built to one model and data reconciled afterwards, at national scale.

Master data. Every electricity meter point in Britain has a number, the MPAN. Every gas meter point has another, the MPRN, and every addressable property has a third, the Unique Property Reference Number. They are issued by different bodies for different purposes, and the join between them has usually been the postal address. When a customer switches supplier, as Ofgem described it in 2016, the supplier takes the customer's address and uses it to search industry databases for the meter points (ofgem.gov.uk). Addresses are not identifiers. Every flat with an odd name, every farmhouse with two meters and every conversion without a postcode is a reconciliation waiting to happen. The settlement reform now under way, which moves every meter in Britain to half-hourly settlement, had moved about 6.5 million meter points by April 2026 (mhhs-prod-webapp.azurewebsites.net), and every move is a test of master data held by suppliers, their agents and Elexon.

The Radio Teleswitch switch-off was a master data problem too. Replacing the old meters first meant finding the households that had them, and working out what their heating depended on.

Governance. In 2024 Drax agreed to pay £25 million after an Ofgem investigation into how it reported data about the wood it burns. Ofgem did not find that the wood failed the sustainability rules. It found "an absence of adequate data governance and controls", and that Drax had been unable to show how its annual submission had been arrived at, or to support the reliability of what it reported about the forest types and sawlogs behind its Canadian consignments (ofgem.gov.uk). The first article in this series argued that every published story has a bill of materials. So does every regulatory return.

Governance is also about acting on data. NESO's review of the fire at North Hyde substation, which closed Heathrow in March 2025, found that it was most likely caused by moisture getting into a transformer bushing. An elevated moisture reading had been detected in oil samples taken in July 2018, but "mitigating actions appropriate to its severity were not implemented" (neso.energy). The data existed for nearly seven years. It never reached a decision.

None of this is news to the industry. The Energy Data Taskforce reported in 2019 that a modern, digital energy system was being held back by "poor quality, inaccurate, or missing data", and recommended that energy system data be "Presumed Open", with a data catalogue, a coordinated register of assets and a unified digital map of the system (es.catapult.org.uk). Ofgem has since asked NESO to coordinate a data sharing infrastructure for the sector until 2028 (ofgem.gov.uk). These are the right instincts. The risk is that each becomes another application, another copy and another reconciliation.

McComb's alternative, quoted in the last article, is applications "designed and built to a single, simple data model", with the data allowed to stay where it is "as long as the model and the query mechanism can access them with reasonable latency". The CIM already does part of this for the network. Every object in it carries a master resource identifier, the mRID, which is master data management built into the model rather than bolted on afterwards. The task is to extend that discipline to everything the network touches: one identifier for each meter point, property, title, asset, consent and fund, and a small shared model of how they relate.

Holons on the wire

The grid has always been a holarchy in Koestler's sense, even if its data has not. The national system contains transmission regions. Each contains grid supply points, distribution networks, primary substations, feeders and finally homes, and each of those is a whole in its own right and part of something larger. Some parts can stand alone. Shetland ran its own island grid until a 600 MW subsea link connected it to the mainland in 2024 (en.wikipedia.org), and a community battery or a farm with its own turbine is a small system inside a larger one.

As on the hillside in the last article, the divisions overlap. The same house sits in a distribution licence area, a transmission charging zone, a NESO connection zone, a council, a constraint boundary, the 500-metre corridor of a new line, and a regional energy plan, since NESO is preparing one for Scotland as a whole (gov.scot). Norway divides its market into five price zones. Britain has decided to keep one. These are different ways of cutting the same network, and none of them is the true one.

The five tests for dividing a graph from the last article apply directly:

1. Custody. Elexon keeps settlement, the DCC smart meter communications, NESO the system model, each network operator its own network model, Registers of Scotland title, the estate its leases and the council its planning decisions. Each fact should live with its keeper and be referred to by identifier.
2. Rules. The Grid Code, the distribution code, licence conditions, consent conditions and the settlement code each set conditions on their own part of the data.
3. Audience. A public map of spare capacity, a household's own consumption, a regulator's view of costs and a resilience planner's view of dependencies are different projections of overlapping data.
4. Sensitivity. Much grid data is critical national infrastructure, and much meter data is personal. Both need handling at the level of the individual fact, not the whole database.
5. Time. Grid data runs on every timescale at once: milliseconds for protection, half-hours for settlement, years for planning and decades for assets.

Once more I should declare an interest. HOLOS (pypi.org), the triplestore I have been building, organises data as holons: sets of named graphs, each with its own boundary of SHACL shapes, its own event log, and an access policy checked as the data is read. Statnett's natural language project lays out its CIM data in named graphs too, which suggests that a utility organised that way is already most of the way to holons. The limits I described last time still apply. HOLOS cannot yet query past versions, or another organisation's database over the web, so a federation across companies would need a layer above it.

Geography is where the holons meet. The Bill Discount Scheme's rule, a home within 500 metres of a new line, is a GeoSPARQL query (prefixes omitted):

SELECT ?home WHERE {
  ?line a en:OverheadLine ; en:status en:UnderConstruction ;
        geo:hasGeometry/geo:asWKT ?route .
  ?home a en:Home ; geo:hasGeometry/geo:asWKT ?where .
  FILTER (geof:sfWithin(?where, geof:buffer(?route, 500, uom:metre)))
}

I ran it in HOLOS against an invented line through Glenmeadhanach and three houses. It found Station Cottages, about 210 metres from the line, and the farmhouse at Mains, about 470 metres away, and left out the old manse at about 840. In a real federation the line would come from the transmission company, the houses from the address register and the rule from the government. None of them would have to copy the others' data for the question to be answered.

Rules as shapes

The queue to connect to the grid is the clearest case of rules that ought to have been shapes. By 2025 it had grown to more than 700 gigawatts, four times what is needed by 2030, because projects joined on a first-come, first-served basis whether or not they were ready to build (neso.energy). Zombie projects held places that real ones needed. In December 2025 NESO re-ordered the queue, leaving 283 GW of generation and storage and 99 GW of demand (knightfrank.co.uk).

The new test of readiness asks, among other things, for evidence of land. On what is called the land route, an applicant needs an option agreement valid for at least three years, existing ownership, or a lease with at least 20 years left to run (ssen.co.uk). The evidence of ownership is a title. The ownership graph of the land article has become a condition of a grid connection.

That test is a shape. I wrote it in SHACL Core and tried it on three invented applications from Glenmeadhanach: a wind farm on land the estate owns, a battery on a farm with 25 years of its lease left, and a solar farm with only 12. My SHACL engine and HOLOS's validator both flagged the solar farm and passed the other two. It is a record-level check, so it could run the moment an application is lodged, rather than months later, and it could read the title from the Land Register rather than from a scanned copy of the deeds.

The same approach fits much of the rest:

• the Bill Discount Scheme's eligibility, which is a geometry and a construction date;
• the community benefit minimum, which is megawatts multiplied by a rate, recorded in a register;
• the conditions attached to a consent for a new line;
• a generator's protection settings, checked against the limits in its connection agreement.

The last of these is not hypothetical. The final report on the blackout that shut down Spain and Portugal on 28 April 2025 found that a significant number of renewable installations disconnected before reaching the voltage thresholds specified at their connection points, some with overvoltage protection set below regulatory limits (pv-magazine.com). A record of every setting, checked against every requirement, would not have changed the physics. It would have shown in advance where the records and the rules disagreed. Utilities are starting down this road: a paper for CIGRE's 2026 session describes a distribution operator in north-west Europe turning its requirement documents into a knowledge graph aligned with the CIM, so that designs can be checked for compliance automatically (e-cigre.org).

Shapes check records, not wires. Someone still has to test the relay and walk the line. What shapes change is when the gaps are found.

The rules are moving

As in the food and forest articles, regulation is heading one way: more facts, tied to places, checked by others.

• Markets. The UK Government decided in July 2025 to keep a single national wholesale price and reform it, rather than introduce zones. On 30 March 2026 the Council of the EU authorised talks on the UK's participation in the EU's internal electricity market, on the basis of dynamic alignment with EU rules. Britain imported 33 TWh more than it exported in 2025, about 12% of its consumption, over links to six countries (enerdata.net).
• Connections and planning. Connections reform, the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, and NESO's Strategic Spatial Energy Plan, the first national plan for where Britain's energy infrastructure should go, now due by the end of 2027 after its deadline was extended in October 2026 (gov.uk).
• Communities. The Bill Discount Scheme from 2027, and mandatory community benefits, with a register, in the Energy Independence Bill.
• Data. CIM models for the distribution networks, the data sharing infrastructure, and half-hourly settlement for every meter.
• Europe. The European Commission's grids package of 10 December 2025 proposes faster permitting and grid planning at EU level, and names limited digitalisation and data availability among the causes of slow permitting (europarl.europa.eu). The EU's 2024 reform of electricity market design gave households, small businesses and public bodies a right to share renewable electricity over the grid. The shared electricity is deducted from each participant's metered consumption, which makes sharing a calculation on meter data. Member states had until 17 July 2026 to write the right into national law, and in September the Commission opened infringement cases against 18 of them (pv-magazine.com).
• Scotland. Consents now go ahead without automatic inquiries. Community ownership has a target. The Land Reform Act's land management plans, when they come into force, will cover the large estates where many wind farms stand. And plans to require clean heating in homes have been redrafted and delayed more than once.

Read across the list and the same facts keep coming up: where an asset is, what it can do, what it is connected to, who owns it and the ground under it, who lives nearby, and what it has promised them. That is the data-centric argument in regulatory form, again. Hold those facts once, with their provenance, and each new rule becomes a new shape and a new projection rather than a new system.

What others have learned

• Denmark: one hub for the meters. Since 2013 Denmark's electricity meter data have run through a single DataHub, operated by the transmission operator Energinet, and in 2016 the market moved to a model in which the supplier deals with the customer and the hub deals with the data (en.energinet.dk). Switching, billing and settlement read the same records.
• Estonia: data that moves with consent. Elering, the Estonian transmission operator, built Estfeed, a decentralised platform that connects energy data hubs and applications, with a consent system so that a household's meter data reach a third party only when the household allows it (cyber.ee). That is the idea of projections and policy from this series, at national scale.
• Norway: the politics of the cables. Norway's exports, including those to Britain, have caused price spikes, particularly in the south (thestar.com.my). The two parties then in government pledged to campaign against renewing the two cables to Denmark when they come up for renewal (euronews.com). Interconnectors are meant to work on price, not politics. In Norway they work on both.
• Germany: the cost of going underground. SuedLink, a 700-kilometre direct-current line to carry wind power from the north to the south of Germany, had to be replanned after the government decided in 2015 to give underground cables priority. The switch added billions of euros and was a major factor in a delay of about six years. The line is now due to enter operation at the end of 2028 (renewable-energy-industry.com). Putting the line underground is what many objectors to new Highland pylons ask for. Germany shows the price, in money and in time.
• The Netherlands: when the grid is full. In December 2025, 14,000 Dutch businesses were waiting for a new or larger connection to the grid (kvk.nl). Since July 2026 households in parts of Stedin's area may be put on a waiting list too, and scarce capacity is allocated according to a framework of social priorities set by the regulator. Agreements with businesses that can shift their demand have freed capacity for others (stedingroep.nl). Knowing who can be flexible, and when, is itself infrastructure.
• Ireland: the data centre question. Data centres used 23% of Ireland's metered electricity in 2025, up from 5% in 2015, and are forecast to use a third by the end of the decade (irishtimes.com). Lanarkshire will test whether Scotland can plan for that kind of demand in advance.
• Spain and Portugal: the data after a blackout. The investigators of the Iberian blackout were hampered by missing data. Distribution operators had no actual production data from generators below 1 MW, mostly rooftop solar, and some owners had no fault records. The report's 22 recommendations include standardised frameworks for collecting data, so that investigators can get complete and consistent records after future incidents (pv-magazine.com).

The lessons for Scotland:

• give every asset and meter point one identifier that every party uses;
• keep the data in a hub or a federation that the rules can read, not in each party's application;
• let data move with consent, through projections;
• know what can flex before the grid is full;
• collect the data an investigation will need before the incident, not after it.

A proposal for Scotland

The food and forest articles each proposed a federation of holons, and suggested that the two should share a lexicon, because a field, a forest compartment, a turbine base and a pylon footing are all pieces of the same land. Electricity is where such a federation is furthest advanced at its core and least connected at its edges.

The hooks are already there:

• NESO's regional energy strategic plan for Scotland, and the national spatial plan;
• the data sharing infrastructure;
• the CIM models the network operators now publish;
• connections reform, with its evidence of land;
• the Bill Discount Scheme and the register of community benefits;
• the Land Reform Act's land management plans;
• Lanarkshire's AI Growth Zone, and the demand that will follow it.

What I would propose has five elements, as before:

1. A single, simple, shared model for the joins. The network already has the CIM, and nobody should remodel it. What is missing is the small model that joins it to everything else: gist at the top, with the CIM for the network, the Land Register for title, UPRNs for property, MPANs for meter points, GeoSPARQL for place and PROV for provenance. The aim is a few hundred concepts that link the domains, not thousands that repeat them.
2. Holons for those who keep the facts: NESO, the transmission and distribution companies, Elexon, the DCC, Registers of Scotland, the Energy Consents Unit, councils, community benefit funds, community energy groups and estates. Each keeps its own data under its own rules, and refers to others' data by identifier.
3. Rules as shapes: readiness criteria, consent conditions, bill discounts, community benefit minimums and the compliance of generator settings, each versioned, and each visiting the data.
4. Projections for each audience:
   • spare capacity and the connection queue for developers and the public;
   • a household's own consumption, shared with others only by consent;
   • the register of community benefits for communities;
   • dependencies and sensitive assets for resilience planners only;
   • aggregated figures for researchers.
5. Pilots before platforms. Five would test most of the ideas:
   • One glen. Every holon around one new line: the route, the land rights, the households within 500 metres, the community benefit and the consent conditions.
   • Turbine to kettle. A community wind farm matched half-hour by half-hour to the homes that part-own it, with the claims about where the power came from carried as data, ready for the day energy sharing reaches Britain.
   • One island. Orkney or Shetland, where constraints, flexibility and fuel poverty meet in one place.
   • One connection. A readiness declaration checked with shapes against the Land Register at the moment it is lodged.
   • One incident. A rehearsal of an investigation like North Hyde's or the Iberian one, with the data it would need gathered in advance.

None of this needs a national platform first. If you hold energy data:

• use the identifiers others use, and publish your own;
• keep the facts separate from the applications that happen to use them;
• write your rules down as shapes;
• reuse the CIM and gist rather than inventing a vocabulary;
• record who said what, and when.

Back to the glen

Late in the evening demand in the cities falls, the wires south have room again, and the turbines on the ridge begin to turn. Their power joins the pool, travels south, and some of it may boil a kettle in Glasgow in the morning, though nobody will ever be able to say which kettle. The new line will stand for most of a century, longer than any system that records it. Whether the glen counts it a burden or a benefit will depend on decisions taken with data held by a dozen keepers: routes and prices, discounts and funds, connections and consents. A knowledge graph cannot make those decisions. What it can do is let all the keepers see the same glen and the same wires: power from the glens, in Johnston's phrase, and power back to them.