The NEURC licensee register has been updated with the help of DiXi Group
The National Commission for State Regulation of Energy and Public Utilities (NEURC) has started publishing an updated license register of companies it regulates. Compared to the previous version, the information is updated as soon as amendments are made and it is published in the correct tabular format.
What’s new in open data?
In addition to the frequency of updating the license register data, the amount of disclosed information has increased too. From now on, not only the data on license issuance decisions are published but also the subsequent decisions of the NEURC within this license case, in particular on cancellation. Information is also published about cases where companies have been denied a license for a certain type of economic activity.
Information about the decisions under which companies will suspend or renew licenses, narrow or extend the scope of licensed activities will also be published in the license register. The dataset also stores information about licenses that are no longer valid.
How has the data handling approach changed?
The NEURC License Register and Register of Economic Entities Operating in the Fields of Energy and Utilities were prepared in the machine-readable format with the expert support of the DiXi Group Analytical Center.
“For a long time, different professionals have taken care of different parts of the license register inside the Regulator, for example, one person is responsible for the gas sector, the other one – for power engineering, and so on. As a result, over the years of the National Commission’s work, detailed information about the licensees has accumulated in different formats with its own peculiarities,” Andrii Bilous, DiXi Group Manager, describes the problems faced by the experts. “Due to the human factor, the number of meaningful errors, such as incorrectly stated NEURC code, incorrect date of license commencement, missing data in the records has also increased significantly.”
As a result, preparing a public consolidated version of the license register was an extremely labour-intensive and low-efficient process. In view of the quality of the primary information, the performer had to manually bring the information to a uniform format and check the correctness of the entries each time.
“Initially, we helped to develop a unified tabular structure for the license register so that all responsible professionals would prepare the data based on one principle,” says Andrii Bilous. “We then helped to process all available archival data on company licensing decisions in accordance with a unified structure, and then helped “clear” them from errors and verify together with NEURC professionals. After that, we trained the Regulator’s professionals on how to keep a register of licensees based on a single approach. We expect that the aforementioned data will soon become available on the Open Data Portal data.gov.ua.”
1As a result of the work, all sectoral data of the license register are consolidated into one machine-readable format. Due to this, Regulator’s professionals have the opportunity to see the necessary information both in the context of companies and decisions with the minimum time needed. It should also be mentioned that the process of keeping the register itself has been greatly simplified and optimized over time. From now on, the Regulator’s employees have the opportunity to spend more time analyzing information rather than maintaining it mechanically.
Note
The list of NEURC data in the public domain can be viewed at the link https://bit.ly/2QqeVVi. It is worth noting that the data are updated on a weekly basis if amended. In addition to the publication on the NEURC website, the publication of data on the portal data.gov.ua is expected.
Previously, DiXi Group helped create an online tool for NEURC – “List of Electricity Suppliers”. It enables consumers to quickly find suppliers, which have joined distribution agreements with relevant system operators, in different regions of the country.
