Succesverhalen

U bent in: Bruikbaar voor u

• Succesverhalen
  • Per marktsegment
  • Per oplossing
  • Per alliantiepartner

MSATS Solution for NEMMCO Powers Full Retail Competition in the Australian Electricity Market

NEMMCO administers the Australian National Electricity Market. It faced some tough challenges to be ready for deregulation affecting eight million domestic electricity consumers.

A project was launched to develop a Market Settlement and Transfer Solution (MSATS) and after a rigorous selection process, NEMMCO entrusted Capgemini as its partner.

Successful on-time delivery of MSATS, connecting 100 separate organisations and 1,000 users, and involving some 4.7 million domestic consumers, is a significant achievement. The solution handles levels of complexity and volumes that have not yet been catered for in similar implementations elsewhere, anywhere in the world.

Client Profile

Founded by the governments of the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria, NEMMCO (National Electricity Market Management Company Limited) administers and operates one of the largest national wholesale and retail electricity markets in the world.

Part of NEMMCO’s role is to provide an effective infrastructure for the efficient operation of the NEM - the National Electricity Market. It also maintains security of the power system and co-ordinates power system planning.

Business Issues

Before the introduction of Full Retail Competition in the Australian NEM, choice of retailer was restricted to large customers consuming more than 160 MWh/annum. Some 18,000 customers had exercised this option in the three years preceding full deregulation.

With the deregulated market expanding to encompass potentially all 7.7 million customers, existing systems and processes were inefficient with a number of manual, paper-based processes. This would have placed a prohibitive cost on retailers and customers attempting to switch once Full Retail Competition was launched.

The deregulation took place against a backdrop of high political visibility. The five state governments making up the NEM are NEMMCO members and each government appoints a director to the NEMMCO Board. In addition, a large number of industry organisations (producers, retailers) are owned by state governments, adding further political dynamics.

The timeline for introduction of Full Retail Competition was legislated. Any movement in the go-live date would have required fresh legislation to be presented to at least one of the state parliaments, and therefore would not have been acceptable.

To facilitate the launch of Full Retail Competition, NEMMCO needed to solve two business problems:

• metering points register
  Allow customers to switch retail supplier by holding a central registry of all the market’s metering points, including all necessary standing data and all the participants (retailers, metering providers, etc.) serving each metering point.
• aggregate metering data
  Allow the wholesale market to be settled by providing to the market settlements systems the aggregated metering data sets that support the retailers’ competitive positions. The production of settlement-ready data would need to include profiling modules to allow customers without wholesale-market compliant meters to participate in competition.

A Market Settlement and Transfer Solution (MSATS), administered by NEMMCO, was recognised as a key deliverable, and tenders were invited to design and build the system. However, at that point, business rules to underpin system transactions had not been established. An added complication was that although states could operate via a single set of rules, each state retained the right to set unique customer transfer and metrology rules. The MSATS solution had to be fully configurable not only to support changes in business rules, but also to allow each state to retain flexibility for such differences.

NEMMCO sought a phased implementation of MSATS functionality over the period of market opening. The phased go-live of the system included scheduled dates for market facilitation, customer transfer and market settlement. This meant that components of the solution had to be ‘market-readied’ to stand alone in a production environment.

As an important KPI (Key Performance Indicator), NEMMCO wanted to measure the number of market minutes lost (MML) that could be attributed to systems supporting the operation of the NEM. The Board sought a partner who could develop a technical solution that facilitated minimum MML. The partner also needed to be willing to share the risk.

With such a complex solution sought in a tight timeframe, NEMMCO looked outside its organisation to find a partner that could quickly deploy a large yet focused, multi-disciplinary team. Following a lengthy tender process, Capgemini was selected as NEMMCO’s supplier.

Solution

Technical Viewpoint

MSATS, built around a Microsoft Windows NT operating system, utilises a three-tier architecture model.

At the data level, an Oracle database is used while the business layer uses an Oracle Application server with the latest Oracle ‘container’ technology. The choice of the particular version of Oracle Application server made NEMMCO one of the first and largest companies to implement the new J2EE capabilities in that version.

MSATS therefore represents the first such implementation deploying this particular suite of Oracle tools in one project - Application server, HTTP server, database and JDeveloperIDE.

Interactive users access the system via a Browser while third-party automated systems access MSATS via a batch interface. The batch interface to the NEMMCO MSATS system adopts

With the highly political and public profile of the project, system reliability of the solution had to be 99.9 percent. This equated to system downtime to within 42 minutes a month.

Capgemini used Compaq’s high-end equipment, including NT servers, Compaq SAN (Storage Area Network) and Oracle Cluster technology. All of these are designed to run applications across multiple sites with in-built redundancy. Cluster technology ensures availability within the production data centre, while Shareplex replication while Shareplex replication technology provides warm stand-by at the secondary data centre.

Because much of the scope of MSATS, in particular the trading arrangements and customer transfer rules, had not been finalised, Capgemini commenced the engagement by using its Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE). This brought together 70 participants and stakeholders in the Australian electricity market, and allowed Capgemini to rapidly build consensus around the design and drive finalisation of the functional specification.

Working in collaboration with NEMMCO staff and participants across the East Coast of Australia, the solution was built at Capgemini’s Advanced Development Centre (ADC) in Chicago. The ADC allowed the project to leverage existing in-house experts who had worked on similar projects in the US and other markets.

In addition, the project team brought in resources from a third-party vendor - ICF Consulting - whose subject experts and source code allowed Capgemini to evolve the metering component of the solution without having to build it from the ground up.

The MSATS Application

MSATS is a B2B transaction and communications hub that facilitates transactions between market participants. It removes the need for participants to communicate with each other bilaterally, instead providing centralised and standardised messaging and transactions that eliminate manual processes.

The MSATS communications hub contains components that solve two business issues to facilitate:

the switch of customers from one retailer to another (CATS - Customer Administration & Transfer System)

wholesale market settlement by providing the metering data that supports each retailer’s aggregate retail position (MDM - Meter Data Management).

CATS

CATS allows retailers to transfer consumers to their selected new retailer by centrally co-ordinating customer transfer details and associated transactions between the old and new retailer, the local network business and other related parties across the NEM.

A single set of configuration rules for CATS, aligned to the customer protection and competition policies of each state, was agreed through a process of consultation with participants and jurisdictions. This made the CATS modules complex, but also highly configurable. About 4,000 rules in 50 change categories have been defined.

MDM

The MSATS MDM modules receive metering data streams from each of the different, allowable metering types. MDM deals with three distinct meter data functions - store; validate and forward; process.

The modules provide a central repository for data-stream metering feeds. This data is validated on receipt to reduce subsequent processing errors. Where required data is missing, MDM estimates this by using any required estimation methodology. Presently, only proxy-day profiling is employed.

The modules create data sets to facilitate wholesale-trading settlement at 30-minute intervals. Where the customer meter does not support trading interval data (i.e. it is a basic meter) the data is ‘profiled’ to create half-hourly interval data. An internal Net System Load Profile can be used to create default readings. Alternatives include an internal sampling profile or one supplied by an external party.

Finally, MDM aggregates the data sets by logical groups to allow settlement by ‘differencing’. Interfaces from MSATS transmit the data to NEMMCO’s existing Market Management System. The MSATS architecture has been designed and tested to support progressive addition of MDM processors to handle 550,000 half-hourly metering data streams. This represents volumes that NEMMCO estimates will be carried through the system over its lifetime. In contrast, the interval-metering database supporting the UK’s electricity market at the time was processing approximately 80,000 metering data streams.

Project Delivery

Because of the legislated go-live date and project profile, Capgemini and NEMMCO agreed to aggressive contractual milestones. Capgemini, confident in its delivery capabilities, agreed to share the risk with NEMMCO.

The willingness to share risks helped to keep all parties focused on progress. In order to meet the contractual milestones, Capgemini leveraged strong project management skills and its accelerated business centres (ADC, ASE). With a team in excess of 100 people, located across multiple sites in Australia and two in the US, the project chose ePMO as its web-deployed global program management tool. This assisted Capgemini and NEMMCO to manage and track issues, risks and changes, and facilitated effective status reporting throughout the project duration.

The architecture for the entire solution was designed and developed from the ground up using accelerators at the Chicago ADC and J2EE standards.

Benefits

Because Capgemini designed a highly configurable system, MSATS is capable of supporting multiple states. As an added bonus, it can also support other forms of energy besides electricity. New jurisdictions can be added at any point. New rules for the jurisdiction can be loaded via a table or GUI interfaces.

From the MDM side of the application, NEMMCO provided Capgemini with the scalability requirements that the market will require over the lifetime of the solution. Capgemini has deployed an adaptable architecture to allow NEMMCO to bolt-on additional processing capability without any re-coding.

In addition to the application being scalable and configurable to meet market needs over the course of the solution’s lifecycle, Capgemini has ensured that the client’s short-term goals are being met. Capgemini put value-at-risk by committing to the Market Minutes Lost KPI that NEMMCO faces.

A NEMMCO spokesperson attests to the success of Capgemini in the MSATS engagement:

“The time frame was ambitious from the start, and despite a significant scope increase in the middle of the project, Capgemini was able to bring the project in on time and budget. NEMMCO could not have picked a better partner.”

Written in co-operation with National Electricity Market Management Company Limited