Methodology

How submissions are received, reviewed, anonymised, and published. The process is deliberately conservative — better to publish fewer entries done well than many done badly.

Entry types

The register contains two kinds of published entry, each clearly labelled:

• Direct submissions are entries from people with first-hand knowledge of the incident — operators, engineers, contractors, asset owners. They are anonymised before publication. Submitter identity is held in confidence and never published. The majority of entries on a mature register will be direct submissions.
• Case studies are entries synthesised from publicly available reporting on major industry incidents — for example, government health and safety publications, EPRI's public BESS Failure Incident Database, regulator findings, and major news reporting. Case studies are clearly tagged on the public register and include a source link to the underlying public material. They reflect only publicly confirmed facts and do not draw conclusions beyond what public sources state. Where investigations are ongoing, case studies note this explicitly.

Case studies were used to seed the register at launch and to ensure the major publicly documented incidents in the industry are represented. Direct submissions are the priority going forward; case studies will be added selectively where a major public incident produces lessons that should be on the register.

Editorial principles

• Anonymisation is mandatory and irreversible. No published entry identifies an operator, site, vendor, supplier, contractor, or individual.
• Descriptive, not investigative. The register describes what happened and what was learned. It does not assign blame, attribute fault, or substitute for regulatory investigation.
• Lessons-led. An entry without a clear lesson is not published. The register exists to share learning, not to log incidents for their own sake.
• Submitter confidentiality. The identity of submitters is held in confidence and never published.
• No commercial promotion. The register does not name, promote, or endorse any product, service, or vendor.
• Public benefit. Every published entry must contribute to industry-wide learning. Material whose primary function is commercial intelligence or competitive disclosure is rejected.

The review process

Each submission moves through a defined sequence before publication.

1. Acknowledgement

Submitters receive an email acknowledgement on receipt, typically within one working day.

2. Initial screening

Each submission is screened for completeness, relevance, and immediate concerns:

• Is the asset class within scope (utility-scale energy)?
• Is the description sufficiently detailed to extract a lesson?
• Are there clear lessons-learned statements?
• Are there obvious identifying details that need removal or further anonymisation?

Submissions that fail screening are returned to the submitter with specific feedback. They may be revised and resubmitted.

3. Anonymisation review

Submissions that pass initial screening go through detailed anonymisation review. Identifying details are removed, including but not limited to:

• Operator, asset owner, site, and project names
• Vendor, equipment manufacturer, integrator, and contractor names
• Personnel names, role titles where they would identify individuals, and team names
• Specific dates beyond year
• Specific capacities, sizes, or geographic locations beyond broad bands
• Combinations of details that, while individually non-identifying, would together uniquely identify a site or party

4. Clarification (if needed)

If the submission requires clarification — to extract a clearer lesson, to verify technical detail, or to confirm anonymisation — the submitter is contacted by email. Clarification correspondence is held in confidence.

5. Publication

Approved entries are published with a unique reference ID (EIR-XXXX), structured fields, and three sections: what happened, contributing factors (where provided), and lessons learned. The submitter is notified by email when their entry is published and is provided with the public reference ID.

6. Correction and takedown

Published entries can be corrected or, in exceptional circumstances, taken down. Submitters may request a correction at any time. Third parties who believe a published entry contains identifying information that should not have been published may request a takedown review at editorial@energyincidentregister.com. All takedown requests are reviewed; outcomes are documented in the annual community report.

Anonymisation policy

Anonymisation is non-negotiable. The register's value depends on the trust submitters place in the process.

What is removed

• All names of operators, sites, vendors, contractors, and personnel
• Project names and brand names
• Specific dates (only year is retained)
• Specific capacities (only size band is retained)
• Specific geographic locations (only broad region is retained)
• Any combination of details that would uniquely identify a site or party

What is retained

• Asset type (BESS, solar, wind, grid infrastructure, hybrid)
• Incident category (thermal, electrical, control system, mechanical, gas release, near-miss, commissioning, other)
• Severity (near-miss, minor, significant, major)
• Year of incident
• Broad geographic region
• Lifecycle stage (commissioning, normal operation, maintenance, end-of-life)
• System size band (e.g. under 10 MW, 10–50 MW, 50–100 MW, 100+ MW)
• Description of what happened, written to convey the technical event without identifying details
• Contributing factors
• Lessons learned

Where anonymisation is uncertain

Where it is not clear whether a combination of retained details could allow identification, the safe choice is taken: details are aggregated, generalised, or removed. The default is to publish less. An entry that loses some specificity but preserves the lesson is better than one that risks identification.

Boundary with regulatory reporting

The register is not a regulator. Submission to the register does not satisfy any regulatory reporting obligation that may apply to the incident under national legislation, employer policy, or contractual requirement. Submitters are responsible for ensuring that any required reporting to the Health and Safety Executive, the relevant national energy regulator, or any other competent authority has been completed.

The register is a complement to regulatory reporting, not a replacement for it. Where an incident is the subject of an active regulatory investigation, submitters should normally wait until the investigation is concluded before submitting, to avoid any conflict with that process.

What is rejected

• Submissions outside the asset scope (residential, behind-the-meter, small commercial)
• Submissions without clear lessons learned
• Submissions that cannot be sufficiently anonymised without losing the lesson
• Submissions whose primary function is commercial criticism, vendor disparagement, or competitive intelligence
• Submissions where the lesson is sector-specific to the point of being irrelevant to the wider industry
• Submissions where the submitter does not appear to have been authorised to share the information

Annual community report

Each year the register publishes an annual community report covering the previous twelve months: number of submissions, number published, number rejected and reasons, headline trends across published entries, methodology changes, governance updates, and funding sources. The report is published openly on the register and is also filed with the CIC Regulator as the company's statutory community interest report.

Limitations

The register is a community resource with finite resources. It does not claim to be comprehensive, statistically representative, or scientifically rigorous. Published entries reflect what has been submitted, which may differ from the true distribution of incidents in the industry. Readers should treat the register as a learning resource — a library of lessons — rather than as authoritative incident statistics.