Mighty River Power - Excelsior II
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Mighty River Power
Project Included:
Software Development
.NET Programming
About
Mighty River Power is an integrated energy generation, trading, retailing and metering business. It was established in 1998, when the Electricity Corporation of New Zealand (ECNZ) was broken up by Government into three independent companies as part of the electricity reforms.
Ownership of the Waikato hydro scheme and its stations was vested in Mighty River Power, building on a proud heritage dating back to the turn of last century when the Waikato River was first identified as a low-cost and sustainable source of electricity.
Mighty River Power own and/or manage a diverse and expanding portfolio of generation assets throughout the North Island. Mighty River Power’s portfolio includes the Waikato hydro scheme, geothermal interests at Mokai and Rotokawa, the Southdown co-generation station and the country's most active biomass generation programme.
Enlighten work closely with the Generation division whose generation assets collectively account for up to 22% of New Zealand's peak energy demand.
Mighty River Power operates a diverse and expanding generation portfolio and more than 20% of their energy production is now non-hydro.
The Problem
Enlighten were contracted to scope and develop the primary tool used by Mighty River Power for the trading of electricity in the New Zealand commodities market. Mighty River Power trades in the “Spot Energy Market” by offering Generation, Reserve and Frequency offers from Hydro, CoGen and Geothermal stations.
Generators compete by creating offers to generate a quantity of power at a specific price. These offers are submitted to the Market via a secure internet site, where they are loaded into a complex solving program which is set up to minimise the final cost to consumers for each trading period. This solving program considers the offers of generators, expected demand, constraints on high voltage lines, and line losses to produce an expected price and level of generation for market participants.
Information is received by the various market participants on expected generation levels and prices, and from here they make further decisions on how they will conduct their trading activities.
Transpower, the System Operator, then uses the above information to produce dispatch instructions using the solving program, which it issues to all power stations around New Zealand via a computerised dispatch tool in real time.
Mighty River Power offered Hydro Generation and Reserve through a tool named Excelsior. Based on Microsoft Excel for its graphic functionality, the performance of the tool was increasingly unsatisfactory and constrained Traders in their trading approach.
The primary objective was to provide a spot energy market trading tool that allowed graphical representation and editing of energy, reserve and frequency offers for the combined thermal and hydro schemes of Mighty River Power.
A mission critical application, a strong focus on performance and stability was a necessity, as well as the development of a Business Continuity mode that allowed traders to continue to trade outside the Mighty River Power network in case of an emergency.
It was also important to maintain the user experience for the new tool, to minimise user re-education and training, while providing greater flexibility for the editing of Offer data.
The Solution
The New Zealand Electricity market is a highly complex and competitive environment. Generators sell their generation into the market, and conversely retailers have to buy the electricity that their customers use out of the market.
Traders need to determine whether to buy or sell electricity based on the spot price and the generation assets that they have available to them. Trading is also regulated by the Electricity Commission who have designed a set of rules that govern the New Zealand Electricity Market.
To ensure a high understanding of the market and trading constraints, Enlighten spent time onsite with Mighty River Power Traders, reviewing and learning about Electricity trading. Enlighten then worked closely with a Mighty River Power Business Analyst to scope and document the business requirements.
A technical review and specification was then undertaken to define the architectural and application design that would allow the trading tool to meet the user and performance requirements.
Development was then broken down into a series of Milestones for tracking progress and ensuring there were strong feedback and review cycles.
The application architecture consists of a front end Microsoft Excel application with the business logic developed in managed code with Microsoft .Net framework and a backend Microsoft SQL Server database. It was appropriately named Excelsior II.
The use of managed code in the Microsoft .Net framework and Microsoft Excel front end ensured that Excelsior II maintained a similar user experience and allowed Traders a greater freedom for editing offers through greatly improved performance. Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003 was the primary development tool with managed code being developed in C# and Visual Basic for Applications, allowing Enlighten to extend, automate, and integrate trading processes into Microsoft Excel 2003.
The application and database are connected via a Microsoft WSE 2.0 web service layer which provides enterprise wide trading data. This was considered to be the first stage of a multi-stage process for moving Mighty River Power to a Services Orientated Architecture (SOA).
The Excelsior Back End System (EBES) then provides a set of storage and retrieval services, imports files and stores the data inside the Excelsior II database. The imported data is then available via the web service layer.
A Business Continuity mode was also developed, that allowed the back end system to be hosted on a laptop/backup machine. The import process continues to work as per the live mode, with the exception that the location for saving downloaded files is local to that machine.
Excelsior II has a series of complex business rules that allows graphical representation and editing of energy, reserve and frequency offers for the combined hydro and geo thermal environments in managed code utilising the .Net framework and Microsoft Excel 2003 as a powerful graphical user interface.
Results
Excelsior II has provided significant performance enhancements, allowing traders to rapidly respond to changing market conditions. The original Excelsior application would take up to 30 seconds to change between interfaces or up to 1 minute to load offers. Excelsior II provides these functions instantly.
Excelsior II performs all edits and calculations locally, shifting the processing to the client. This has resulted in greater performance as the application operates in a disconnected fashion, connecting to the backend only to save or refresh data.
Consideration of database and application performance is also illustrated in the database design. Indexes are used where ever common access strategies have been identified. Other examples of designing for performance are noted in the inclusion of the cumulative data in various tables and the use of computed primary keys to assist in retrieving temporal data.
Performance was also dramatically increased as Excelsior II stores offers as XML due to the large number of records that are inserted on a daily basis. While this increased the amount of text being stored, the issue was overcome by using software compression for the loading and saving of the xml data, decreasing the size of a saved offer by 70%.
The application is also highly stable. Any errors encountered are caught and translated to sensible language that is then logged in Microsoft SQL server for review.
User confidence has also increased significantly, allowing Traders to continue to automate process and feel confident in the tools ability to calculate and display correct data representations without needing to manually edit equations in Microsoft Excel.
Since the introduction of Excelsior II, Traders have experienced significantly improved performance and stability. No longer is there a concern that the application will fail or hang at inopportune times. The new editing features also allow for quick and concise trading decisions to be implemented almost instantaneously.
The SOA also provides a useful abstraction for hiding the implementation details of the Mighty River Power trading process. The trading process had involved collecting information from a variety of diverse sources; these included a number of databases and flat files. Traders had to locate and import the data manually, whereas much of this process is now automated.
The energy industry is seeing changes in the way trading information is exchanged. An evolving market, the use of a SOA has provided the benefits of isolating the effect of these changes to very specific locations within the system, namely the external entry and exit points. This has reduced the maintenance required and allowed for greater scalability.
The Microsoft Excel and the Microsoft .Net framework allows traders to automate trading process while providing the flexibility to respond to one off or new situations and utilising the power of Excel for on the fly calculations. It also provides the graphical representation and editing of energy, reserve and frequency offers for the combined thermal and hydro schemes.
The tool is soon to be extended to further support geothermal and CoGen energy offers.