NW Scales Clean Energy Governance Across Thousands of Assets with OpenMetadata

Timely, reliable insights are essential in the push for cleaner energy and electric mobility. However, NW’s data ecosystem — spanning Kafka, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, and Power BI — was hard to manage without a central governance layer. Lineage was tracked manually, ownership was scattered, and outdated descriptions or tags created confusion. Endless hours were spent retracing where data came from and where it was going, delaying decisions about grid stability, infrastructure planning, and operational efficiency. Since this eroded trust in analytics, engineers were buried in upkeep while business users questioned which data to rely on, and this left both groups of users lacking the clarity necessary to drive innovation.

Attempting to make legitimate change throughout their organization, NW turned to OpenMetadata to establish a single source of truth across its data ecosystem. By integrating Kafka, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, and Power BI with this new, central solution, NW brought its critical systems together into one metadata catalog. With more than 90 connectors available, OpenMetadata allowed NW’s teams to unify their data environment without building custom integrations. Once adopted, OpenMetadata addressed NW’s main obstacles directly. Firstly, built-in lineage and relationships provided end-to-end visibility across the company’s data assets and eliminated the need for engineers to trace flows manually. Second, metadata enrichment features made it easy to assign owners, add tags, and apply certifications, which reduced confusion and standardized documentation. Third, governance was embedded into orchestration workflows with automation-ready APIs, making manual processes repeatable. Despite all of these improvements, the most significant step forward for NW came with the MCP, which connects large language models (LLMs), like Claude, OpenAI , or Gemini, directly to OpenMetadata. With MCP, governance tasks are triggered through simple prompts (e.g., search the data, generate the lineage, or create glossary terms). By bringing LLMs into the loop, MCP successfully shifted NW’s governance from reactive maintenance to proactive momentum.

Instead of wasting time on repetitive governance tasks, NW benefited from a centralized system that accelerated insight delivery and strengthened trust in its data. OpenMetadata created a reliable source of truth across its data ecosystem while helping the company manage thousands of diverse assets. With a combination of automation and MCP, NW showed how governance can move beyond cataloging into AI-driven workflows.