Kinnect Settlement Solution project

How it relates to you

Our core settlement systems are the ‘engine’ of Elexon and ensure that balancing and settlement runs smoothly and accurately for industry, day in, day out, for the GB electricity market. We are upgrading our central systems to a cloud native digital platform that can perform scalable, flexible and modular settlement operations.

• Customer Solution service – providing an intuitive customer experience
• Insights Solution project – to receive, process and publish data

Project timeline

Benefits

The Settlement Solution is a solution that’s born in cloud technologies; leveraging various services to achieve scalability from the very beginning.

The Settlement Solution in Kinnect establishes several modular components, which will each access data storage and processing technologies that can be developed quickly in response to changes in market rules, without unduly impacting other services. New data storage and processing technologies will also enable access to the BSC data within the Settlement calculations. The microservices architecture style is what helps to achieve flexibility and modularity.

The flexible, cloud-based technology we will use for the Settlement Solution will allow us to respond to the needs of our customers by reducing manual processes, delivering BSC change and support for innovation more quickly and efficiently. This means we can deliver changes to the BSC faster, resulting in lower overall costs for our customers.

By using microservices that splits the systems into smaller components, it will be easier and quicker to make changes and improvements as well as increasing the accuracy of early Settlement calculations.

Reducing complexity

The solution will also reduce the complexity of change and will allow for a more efficient testing process, reducing time and costs for our customers. It also allows us to dispose of and replace redundant code provisions as an alternative to implementing significant changes to the code base, thereby reducing the scale and complexity of implementing BSC change.

The Settlement Solution will increase data quality of Settlement Runs, reducing the financial variation in billing at the point of Final Reconciliation, as well as being able to recover from a failed Settlement run a lot quicker, it will reduce the impact on customers too.

By using a modular infrastructure, we can assess the impact of multiple changes to the same part of the system without any operational impact to the production system as a whole.

Future market changes

The Settlement Solution will also provide greater ability to manage large sector-wide changes such as Market-wide Half Hourly Settlement. Market-wide Half Hourly Settlement is a once in a generation change providing the bedrock for a smarter system which promotes and rewards more consumer engagement and participation.

It is major changes like this that the solution will support and is vital to deliver net zero.

In the future, by having this cloud-based technology, it will allow us to offer multiple, concurrent sandbox trials, and it could potentially enable us to move beyond a regulatory sandbox to offer a technical sandbox to predict the impact of new business models on settlement without the need for derogations.

If 15-minute Settlement or even 5-minute Settlement was introduced in the future, the solution will be ready to adapt far more quickly than the current systems.

As well as being suitable for local or regional settlement, the Settlement solution is also adaptable, and could potentially be used beyond electricity settlement. This could support future Code consolidation and reduction of costs to customers.

Operational efficiency

The solution will also drive operational efficiency within Elexon through greater automation and real time monitoring as the data is orchestrated through the mircoservices. The ability to then use analytics on each stage of the meter to bank calculation allows us to identify areas for improvement in Settlement – effectively providing a feedback loop to the Performance Assurance process and identifying areas of Settlement risk. Ultimately, this means we can support our customers quickly and efficiently.

Background to the project

Our systems haven’t been replaced since Elexon was formed around 20 years ago. We need to invest in our systems in order to minimise risk to settlement and are flexible for future arrangements, so that we can serve our customers today, and in the years to come.

We are upgrading our central systems to a cloud native digital platform that can perform scalable, flexible and modular settlement operations.

About the Kinnect platform

Elexon Kinnect is a digital customer-centric platform delivering a smart and flexible central solution for the industry, which will be delivered through a number of releases over the next few years.

The modular technology it uses will enable us to implement BSC rule changes more quickly, and provide speedier support for innovation by existing companies and new entrants.

Elexon Kinnect is made up of three elements:

Elexon Kinnect is a key pillar of our corporate strategy. It will enable us to achieve our vision of creating the leading provider of essential market services to the GB energy sector, for the benefit of market participants and their customers while serving at the heart of the energy industry, building a path to net zero.

By having a strong, scalable digital platform will support industry innovation, allow faster delivery of change, reduce the need for manual processes, which will ultimately mean we can support the industry in the future as move at pace to achieve the demands for Net Zero.

Ultimately, deploying Kinnect will result in a much better user experience and better value for money on BSC services, for all of our customers and stakeholders.