Britain's grid operator filed its Palantir lock-in as the legal basis for a £21.2m direct award

Foundry is where NESO holds the data and workflows for connecting new renewable projects, battery storage and consumers to the electricity transmission network ^[16]. Four years of that work, starting in March 2023 ^[14], is what the direct award is protecting.

The transparency notice, which Lindsay Clark reported for The Register ^[21], lists four things a move would require: redeveloping the analytics environment, migrating the data, putting the replacement through security accreditation and retraining staff ^[6]. Two of those are priced by the vendor's design. Redevelopment and migration cost whatever share of your schema and your process logic sits inside the supplier's ontology rather than in something you could hand to a successor. The other two you would pay to any replacement. Accreditation and retraining are the ordinary cost of change, and they tend to be the pair doing the arguing when a migration slips, because they arrive as staff time nobody budgeted.

The money gives a run rate. Datacenter Dynamics reports the contract is expected to last between ten and 22 months ^[17]. At £17,700,270 before VAT, 22 months works out at roughly £805,000 a month for licensing and support on two processes, Connections and Skip Rates ^[2][1]. VAT adds £3,540,054 on top ^[1].

How long it lasts depends on which document you read. The notice allows six-month extensions until 31 July 2028, a year beyond the initial term that ends on 31 July 2027 ^[8][3][4]. Its risk clause names legacy data structures, security, data quality and regulatory compliance as things that could go wrong in the migration, in which case the contract may be modified to extend the transition timeline ^[9]. Those are the conditions the justification already says exist ^[6].

NESO recorded that it prepared or revised a conflicts assessment, and the notice does not say what it found ^[11]. That gap matters because of what comes after the stopgap: a Strategic Enterprise Modelling Capability procurement running July 2027 to July 2032, with a possible two-year extension that could keep the winner in place until 2034 ^[12]. Held from March 2023 to 2034, that is about eleven years of the same supplier ^[3]. NESO says it is running a competitive procurement for a replacement and has begun sounding out suppliers ^[7]. In the NHS, roughly £60m of Palantir contracts, some without competition, preceded an open competition for a Federated Data Platform worth up to £330m, where incumbency was argued to have helped and the NHS said the competition was fair ^[13].

The usable artefact here is the notice itself. Any team about to sign a platform can draft, in an afternoon, the Section 41 justification it would have to file in year four ^[4]: the processes that would need redeveloping, the data that would need migrating, the accreditation, the staff hours. A buyer who cannot fill in those four lines does not yet know the price of the deal. One who can fill them in, and finds the draft reads like NESO's, at least has that price in hand before signing rather than four years afterwards.