SSE chooses Energy One's enVoy for electronic data transfer with National Grid

The Company

SSE supplies electricity, gas and other energy related services to more than 7 million customers across the UK. It has around 20,000 employees, who are involved in the generation, transmission, distribution and supply of electricity, in the production, storage, distribution and supply of gas and in other energy services.

The UK’s largest generator of renewable energy, SSE is a leading developer, operator and owner of renewable energy assets across the UK and Ireland and supplies greener energy to more than 5,000 businesses in the UK and more than 800,000 homes and businesses across ROI and Northern Ireland.

It is committed to providing the energy people need, in a reliable and sustainable way.

SSE chose Energy One’s integrated energy nomination and scheduling platform, enVoy, to provide a reliable and future-proofed system for electronic data transfer with National Grid.

The Challenge

Fiona Keiller, ETRM Project Director at SSE comments: “The systems we had been using to manage the market communications for a number of years were reaching the end of their shelf life, and we wanted to replace them with a modern, reliable, future-proofed system that could manage our large number of BMUs, National Grid submissions, and incoming data.

“We currently have 175 registered BMUs and are processing approximately 3,500 submissions to the National Grid every day and wanted a system that would perform well, manage the EDT efficiently and be designed to be easy to use.”

The Solution

SSE selected Energy One’s enVoy communications framework to provide a reliable interface for National Grid EDT.

Fiona Keiller comments: “We were impressed with the enVoy software functionality and ease of use. With our old systems, for example, it had become more difficult to input data, and we were reliant on our IT team for support. However, with enVoy the SSE Energy Portfolio Management Team can input or amend standing data directly into enVoy.”

“enVoy’s web based, colour coded format is well thought out, easy to understand, use and navigate. It is also configurable and includes useful functionality.

“We were also impressed with the [Energy One] team: as well as being an IT developer and vendor, it has strong power market knowledge and understands the rules in this very bespoke, complex area, and this means the systems perform all of the required tasks.”

We have a close working partnership with the [Energy One] team in Solihull, and during the implementation, SSE’s team members were quickly able to become expert system users, which means that we are now able to undertake the majority of any training required, in house.
Fiona Keiller, ETRM Project Director, SSE

The Implementation

Fiona continues: “At SSE, enVoy is embedded into a complex suite of systems and we undertook a testing phase, running our existing system in parallel, to ensure that enVoy was well tested before going live. Since going live, the system has performed well.

“We have a close working partnership with the [Energy One] team in Solihull and, during the implementation, SSE’s team members were quickly able to become expert system users, which means that we are now able to undertake the majority of any training required, in house.”

The Results

Fiona Keiller comments: “Since going live with enVoy for National Grid EDT we have done in the region of two million submissions and the system is performing well and has proved to be very reliable.

“enVoy runs efficiently in the background, with only minimal user intervention required, and undertakes an extremely important, business critical task for SSE. We have found the web based, modern system to be easy to use and navigate, with new users easy for us to train in-house.”