CASE STUDY: Independent Aggregator for eSett
Unicorn Systems successfully delivered a major upgrade of the Nordic Balance Settlement model for the upcoming Independent Aggregation of Balancing Services in the Nordic countries.
Harmonised Nordic settlement model
The Nordic electricity market has reached a unique level of integration, enabling a joint platform (Nordic Balance Settlement) to connect all 4 countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) to establish a common imbalance settlement solution for a competitive end-user market.
Increased competition among electricity providers will give rise to socioeconomic efficiency gains in the region. Competition through a common Nordic retail market is considered essential to ensure high-quality services at the lowest price, to stimulate innovation and to maximise social welfare in the Nordic region.
The introduction of the Independent Aggregator in the Nordic Imbalance Settlement model aims to improve the efficiency, competition, and reliability of the electricity market while enabling the integration of renewable energy sources and ensuring grid stability.
Project Goal
The primary goal of the project was to introduce a new market participant role to the system: Independent Aggregator, which is a Balancing Service Provider (BSP) that can aggregate and activate balancing services on a controlled portfolio of assets. As part of the project, the current Balance Responsible Party (BRP) relationship to BSPs has been extended to support multiple relations and responsibilities within one company for invoicing purposes. This new role will be utilised initially in Finland for aFRR balancing reserves and eventually expanded further.
The model supports different types of delivery:
- Own Assets
- Contractual Assets
- Independent Aggregation
The delivery rules are country-specific. New invoicing products have been added for compensation between the BRPs and BSPs, as well as Regulation Imbalance and fees to settle the imbalance caused by differences between the activation and delivery of balancing energy.
The current balancing services model in the NBS system has been extended to include Activated Reserves on the BSP level as well as the actual delivery of balancing energy (Delivered Reserves). These new products come with a variety of new views to allow for monitoring of values and access to the data for market parties in the public Online Service, as well as new incoming and outgoing dataflows to facilitate data exchange.
The solution was designed to be flexible and adjustable for different regulations and requirements in each country, and allow a smooth transition of each balancing sub-service within its own Go-Live date.
Who is our customer
eSett is a company providing settlement services to electricity market participants in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.
The company is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland and was formed at the beginning of 2013 to support the transition towards a harmonised model for imbalance settlement. During the year 2017, eSett took over the operational responsibility for the imbalance settlement and invoicing of the market participants in Finland, Norway and Sweden by the commissioning of the Nordic imbalance settlement model. Denmark joined the Nordic imbalance settlement in 2021. As a joint service company, eSett is owned by the four TSOs with equal shares.
Damas MMS:E
Damas MMS:E is a comprehensive energy market management information system primarily designed and developed for the needs of transmission system operators, HVDC interconnectors and market operators operating in an open energy market environment.
Damas MMS:E fully supports market-related processes of transmission system operators and market operators in the following areas:
- System Services – Maintain the system balance using ancillary services efficiently and with minimum costs.
- Transmission Services – Gain income from congestion management and manage cross-border flows.
- Settlement Services – Evaluate and settle energy market transactions and make and receive payments.
NBS Delivery
Damas MMS:E platform delivery is based on three core pillars: configuration, customisation, and integration with external systems. In the Nordic Balance Settlement, these fundamental principles are utilized to their maximum potential in order to cover the complex situation of the Nordic harmonized settlement model.
Configuration and Customisation
A key strength of Damas MMS:E is its extensive configurability. Fundamental parts of the platform can be set up directly by analysts, allowing time efficient and accurate delivery of business implementation.
The platform's adaptability enables us to efficiently support agile sprint-based delivery, design further upgrades to the solution, prepare prototypes and connect custom-tailored specific implementation for functionalities outside of the platform's out-of-the box tools.
Integrations
Damas MMS:E allows seamless integration to a variety of external systems and market parties. Dataflows are facilitated through ECP/EDX, Web Services, FTP, and E-mail channels via CIM based Ediel, ebIX XML, and UTILTS document formats. To efficiently manage the high daily message throughput — reaching up to 300,000 — performance optimisation is a critical component of the platform integration.
- Extensive standing data management
- System configuration
- Over 14 unique incoming types of input data from:
- Balance Responsible Parties (BRPs)
- Balancing Service Providers (BSPs)
- Transmission System Operators (TSOs)
- Nominated Electricity Market Operators (NEMOs)
- Distribution System Operators (DSOs)
- Datahubs
- 15-minute resolution Imbalance Settlement
- Weekly invoicing for BRPs, BSPs and TSOs covering:
- Imbalance and Regulation Imbalance
- Balancing services capacity market
- Balancing services activation
- Balancing services delivery and compensation
- Fees
- Monthly invoicing for Profiled Consumption in Sweden
- Calculation and demand of collateral for invoice market participants
- Extensive reporting options:
- Outgoing data packages
- SOAP and REST API Information Service
- Business Intelligence tools
- Publication to eSett's Public Web
- Public Online Service accessible for all market participants
- Multiple layers of monitoring for data quality, messages and data anomaly detection
Market Participants and data scope:
- 250+ BRPs
- 150+ BSPs
- 900+ Retailers
- 500+ DSOs
- 4 TSOs
- 6 000+ Users
- ~ 300 000 messages daily
- ~ 1.1 billion values calculated every 5 minutes
