To participate in a market, we need to know the MPAN of the user’s meter. This is the primary identifier that actors within the electricity system use to identify a consumer of electricity. We can typically retrieve this from the user’s address, and we provide tooling for you to do this.
If you are looking to collect better address data, see Collecting and validating addresses.
We’ll help you retrieve the meter details for an address, including the eligible markets for that meter.

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Retrieving the MPAN

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Quick lookup

Use the MPAN lookup endpoint to retrieve the MPAN for a given address. If we can find a single unambiguous MPAN, we’ll return it.
If we cannot unambiguously identify the meter at the provided address, this endpoint will return 422. In this case, you should use the exhaustive lookup.

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Exhaustive lookup

If you’d like finer-grained control over the lookup, you can use a multistep process to retrieve partially matching addresses, identify the best match, and then retrieve the relevant meter details.
1

Retrieve a list of matching addresses

Use the search meters endpoint to search by postcode and optionally a building_identifier. This returns a list of possible matches.
2

Identify the best match

Use your own workflow to identify which of the returned options is the best match to your search. For instance, you could expose this list to users directly and ask them to select their property.
3

Retrieve the meter details for your chosen address

Pass the ref from your chosen address to the meter info by ref endpoint to retrieve the meter details.

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Understanding market eligibility

Different sites are eligible for different flexibility markets. When you retrieve the meter details for a site, we return supplemental data about that meter. These include the markets that the site is eligible for. You can also retrieve these for known MPANs using the meter info endpoint.