Delivering a hosted BM solution for West Burton Energy

Brief

Following the acquisition of the West Burton B power station from EDF Energy, West Burton Energy embarked on separating the site’s 1.3 GW Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) and 49 MW storage battery asset from EDF’s IT networks. We were invited to help establish independent IT infrastructure and provide a new suite of software to streamline BM processes. In delivering the project, West Burton Energy became the first customer to benefit from our enhanced Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) grade-managed infrastructure service offering.

Solution

IT Infrastructure

The infrastructure needed to be built from the ground up, including a new independent EDL connection to NGESO. A new Control Point circuit can take up to a year to establish, immediately taking us outside the 6-month implementation window. This time constraint was overcome by the customer agreeing for us to host them via our new hosting service.  Our preferred Tier-3 data centres have existing connections to NGESO, which significantly reduce implementation time and guarantee 99.98% uptime, providing our customers with a robust and reliable solution. A mains independent link was also established between West Burton and the data centre to ensure compliance with NGESO Communication Standards.

Software Upgrades

We configured our Sentinel NGESO and Elexon Interface suites to streamline West Burton’s BM processes and deployed them on the hosted environment. Software modules included; Sentinel EDT providing automated dispatch of consistent and reliable physical and commercial data to NGESO, ensuring the customer’s position is always known and clear, Sentinel EDL providing BOA acceptance and execution automation, ensuring NGESO instructions are never missed and executed in-line with commitments, and SOLV THOR and TA integrated with Sentinel EDL, to forecast availability and automate the calculation, submission and publication of availability changes required under REMIT.

Results

In the delivery of the solution, the following was achieved:

• Customer separation from the prior owner’s network on time and on budget
• Improved business processes with automation of critical system functions, increasing reliability and managing risk by reducing human interaction and subsequent error
• A streamlined experience for the control room team with two-way integration with the route to the market provider, reducing trading, imbalance and compliance risk
• A single vendor to manage the software and infrastructure, streamlining the support process.

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