Elexon is a company of over 150 members of staff, and are key to the successful running of the electricity industry. It is a not-for-profit entity, funded by electricity market participants and was established on 1 August 2000 to manage the Balancing and Settlement Code (BSC) ahead of the New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA) that went live on 27 March 2001. Since then, other changes have taken place that have transformed Elexon’s role within the electricity market.
Evolving Service Needs
The Engage Information Services practice have developed, maintained and supported the internal industry related applications that Elexon requires to deliver its services to the electricity market since 2004. Between 2007 and 2016 we provided this under the Market Monitoring Support Services (MMSS), which formalised the previous T&M arrangements between Elexon and Engage for application, business, maintenance & support and development services.
In 2017 this contract was consolidated into the current Elexon – Engage Single Service Support Contract. This new service was created to maximise the efficiency of the development and support services jointly provided to EMRS since 2015 by combining them into a unified contract.
As of May 2023 we have delivered over 100 fixed price development projects for Elexon – largely resulting from modifications to the industry rules and to increase operational efficiency – and currently maintain and support in excess of 30 specialist industry related applications for 150 staff.
Our Software Solutions
The applications vary in nature and include:
- The Government Energy Price Guarantee Scheme application;
- Large database systems that receive, store, process and report on large quantities of trading and metered data relating to electricity suppliers, generators and traders – replicating numerous settlement calculations and delivering many of ELEXON’s operational controls;
- “real time” high availability systems that listen for, store, process and report on TIBCO messages broadcast on the industry network;
- file management systems – that validate industry data and route it internally, to market participants or for publication;
- systems that integrate with the ELEXON website in order to publish market related data; and various utilities and tools that improve ELEXON’s data analysis role and operations.
Our Approach
In order to deliver this service effectively and efficiently, we developed a bespoke application framework called LuSTRe (Load Store Transform Report). This framework provides a single codebase to support all the functions common to ELEXON’s applications, reducing the development time and cost of new and changed applications significantly, resulting in material benefits to ELEXON’s many stakeholders and allowing ELEXON to respond quickly to their changing needs.
Our system developments comprise the full project lifecycle from Impact Assessment through to Customer Acceptance, often in extremely demanding timescales driven by industry deadlines. The Information Services team have an exemplary track-record of having delivered all these development projects fully functional on time and to budget.