Beyond Third Parties: Promoting innovation through energy data sharing with "nth" parties

An ecosystem of companies in the energy industry enables customers with numerous innovative products and services. When a customer shares his or her private electricity or natural gas data with a certain company, there are often several firms in a “digital supply chain” that acquire and process the data to eventually deliver services to that customer, whether the customer is aware of those entities or not. Referred to as “Nth” parties, these entities represent exciting innovations in the energy sector, but they will be stifled in the absence of thoughtful, targeted policies and customer-centric data exchange mechanisms.