BSCCo Review

This report summarises the operation of the Balancing and Settlement Code (BSC) for the third quarter of the Financial Year 2012/13 and describes the activities of the BSC Panel and its Committees. The report also reviews ELEXON’s performance against the BSCCo Business Strategy and Budget for 2012/13.

Our strategy this year is to maintain and build upon our previous achievements to fulfill our mission – “To deliver the BSC effectively, efficiently and economically, to the benefit of our customers”, and to support the best strategic outcomes for the evolving industry by pursuing our vision – “to be a leader in the efficient transformation of energy markets by providing shared solutions to address common industry problems.”

We aim to achieve our strategy by fulfilling five strategic priorities designed to improve our service to our customers and stakeholders. These are to:

• Actively manage, and continually improve, BSC services to ensure that we deliver in an efficient, effective and economic way
• Drive efficiencies and savings in our operational business
• Improve the customer experience and develop richer customer relationships
• Develop our services and adapt our business to address industry challenges
• Invest in our people for the benefit of our industry

To pursue our vision, we will develop our services and adapt our business to address industry challenges.

We’ve highlighted some of the key successes below, but you can get a fuller picture of our business activity from the reports presented at each BSC Panel meeting:

• ELEXON report  204 14 September 2012 to 5th October 2012

• ELEXON report 205 12 October 2012 to 2 November 2012

• ELEXON report  206 9 November 2012 to 7 December 2012

• ELEXON report  208 14 December 2012 to 6 January 2013

and from our weekly Newscast bulletins.

Managing and improving BSC Services

Risk Operating Plan (ROP) 2013/14 Published

In November, we presented the Risk Operating Plan (ROP) 2013/14 to the Performance Assurance Board (PAB). This followed responses we received to the industry consultation. The PAB reviewed and approved the ROP which will take effect from Monday 1 April 2013. The Risk Operating Plan (ROP) sets out the Settlement Risks and the Performance Assurance Techniques (PATs) that the Performance Assurance Board (PAB) will apply to manage Settlement Risks relating to Supplier Volume Allocation (SVA), Central Volume Allocation (CVA) and Central Systems processes.

 Smarter Markets – Delivering Settlement Reform, a consultation

At the end of July, Ofgem asked the BSC Panel to provide a report by the end of 2012 setting out how the Panel and industry could undertake a review and reform of the Settlement arrangements (Supplier Volume Allocation) in support of Ofgem’s Smarter Markets work. Ofgem will decide how it wishes the work to proceed early next year.

ELEXON developed the report in conjunction with an advisory group and in October, we issued our ‘Delivering Settlement Reform’ consultation.

BSCCo Business Plan 2013-14

In December, we published the BSCCo (Balancing and Settlement Code Company) draft Business Strategy and Annual Budget for 2013-14. The Business Plan is in two parts – a Business Strategy describing our priorities and major activities and an Annual Budget setting out the associated costs.

Improving the customer experience

ELEXON Board Members

Following the approval of Modification P281 ‘Change of BSCCo Board of Directors & Chairman’, the BSCCo Board ran an appointment process to appoint new Non-Executive Directors in November. P281 allowed for interim board appointments to be made, pending the completion of the full recruitment process. Andrew Pinder, the BSCCo chairman, has, after consulting with the BSC Panel, exercised this option and has re-appointed Barbara Vest and Nigel Cornwall. Both Barbara and Nigel served as ELEXON Board directors over the last two years and will continue to act in that role until replacement industry directors are appointed.

For more information about our Board members, please visit the Management Team page of our website.

2012 Customer Survey Results published

In November, we published our customer survey results for 2012. Our independent research company, Researchcraft, carried out the survey between June and July. We’re really pleased with the results this year. 65% of respondents scored us 8 or more out of 10 for overall satisfaction, and our value for money score rocketed by 11% compared to 2011. The feedback from the survey is an important input into our planning process, and there were suggestions in the survey for areas where we could improve. We’d like to thank all customers who took the time to respond to this year’s survey.

The survey results are available here.

Cross-Codes Electricity Forum

On Friday 16 November, ELEXON hosted the 15th Cross-Codes Electricity Forum (CCEF) in conjunction with National Grid and Electralink. The session was well attended and feedback received was universal in rating the session ‘very good’. More details of the CCEF are available here.

“Introducing ELEXON” Seminar: 5 December 2012

Our “Introducing ELEXON” Seminar on Wednesday 5 December was a great success. Some of the very positive feedback from our audience of the Big Six, smaller Suppliers and other attendees included:

“Overall, the day was very interesting, all speakers were very helpful and informative and willing to answer the questions asked. Really enjoyed the event. Good work.” Tryfon Tzelis, E.ON

 “A very informative day, thank you.” Elizabeth Ferry, BritNed

 “A well set up day – presentations led into each other. Feel the topics were at the right level for and introductory seminar.” Elaine Carr, ScottishPower

Developing our services

ELEXON wins National Outsourcing Association Award

In October, ELEXON was awarded the prestigious BPO Contract of the Year at the National Outsourcing Association Awards (NOAAs) with its partner Logica, now part of CGI.

The prestigious award recognises ELEXON’s strengths in working in partnership to deliver best-in-class business process outsourcing (BPO). The award follows ELEXON’S recent Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) accreditation and confirms that our procurement and contract management disciplines meet best practice and deliver outstanding results for our customers.

Our press release goes into greater detail about our win.

ELEXON wins CIPS Certification recognising best practice in procuring and managing contracts

We have been awarded the prestigious Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) certification. The award recognises our expertise and excellence in a core area of our business – procuring and managing contracts to deliver our services. This is great news for us because it acknowledges that our procurement policies, procedures and processes follow best practice.

For more information, click here to read our press release.

European Developments

ELEXON is monitoring and, where appropriate, engaging with European developments because we need to identify and assess potential impacts on BSC systems and processes.   We intend to flag these potential impacts to Government, Ofgem and BSC Parties as appropriate.

The principle impact of European developments on the BSC will come from the Electricity Balancing Network Code.  On 21 December, ENTSO-E was formally invited by the European Commission to develop a Network Code for Electricity Balancing. The mandate letter specifies that the Network Code must be delivered to ACER by 1st January 2014.

The European Transparency Regulation is now essentially completed and is likely to enter force this summer 2013, with full implementation required within 18 months after that.  This Regulation requires market participants (TSOs, DSO, Interconnectors, Generators and large consumers) to provide a wide variety of data to a new central information transparency platform (to be procured by ENTSO-E).

The Transparency Regulation potentially interacts with the BSC arrangements in a number of ways as many of the required data items are similar to data items already collected and reported to GB parties under the governance of the Grid Code and/or BSC and there is an existing reporting of BSC imbalance prices and Net Imbalance Volume from BMRS to the current European reporting platform, since the implementation of CP1246 (‘A New Interface from BMRS to the ETSOVista Reporting System’) in November 2008.

Electricity Market Reform (EMR)

The Government published the Energy Bill and supporting documents in November, and the Energy Bill received its second reading in the House of Commons on 19 December.  The Bill contains the proposed legislation for EMR.

We continue to believe that ELEXON is very well placed to perform the settlement calculations and payments for EMR.

Smart Metering & Smarter Markets

We continued to engage closely with the DECC Smart Programme and Ofgem across this period.

Our experts completed their support to the End-to-End solution workstream in November. ELEXON continues to work with industry and host workshops with our customers to discuss BSC impacts arising from changes required for meter technical details, ready to progress a change proposal in the New Year.

We will continue to support the DECC Programme examining the consequential changes required to the BSC in support of the smart rollout. We responded to DECC’s consultation on the Smart Metering Equipment Technical Specification (version 2) in October.

Throughout September to December ELEXON worked with an industry advisory group to develop a plan for delivering Settlement Reform as part of the Ofgem Smarter Markets initiative. ELEXON held a workshop for stakeholders and consulted on the proposed plans for managing a review of Settlement. The Panel approved and issued its final report to Ofgem in December. Ofgem will confirm if it wishes the Panel to deliver the reform by the end of Q1 2013.