About the Insights Solution service

Data removal / historical records

Q. Which BMRS APIs are being decommissioned?

A. Several APIs that are available via the legacy DataPush service and TIBCO have not been created within the Insights Solution. In most cases this has happened where the need to publish some European Transparency Data was removed with the introduction of BSC Change Proposal CP1583, or because the UK did not participate in the European Trans European Replacement Reserves Exchange (TERRE).

• View our data roadmap

Q. What is the earliest data in Insights?
A. Historic data obtained from the legacy BMRS (Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service) has been loaded into the Insights Solution as below:

• REMIT – June 2017
• Physical Data – Jan 2016
• Transparency Data – May 2023

Settlement data

Q. Why does the SAA (Settlement Administration Agent) calculation differ from legacy BMRS (Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service)?

A. There are variations in the way that the legacy BMRS and the Insights Solution calculates this data.

The Insights Solution runs the calculation after 14 minutes and BMRS after 22 minutes after any given Settlement Period.

If there are late acceptances these will not be considered on the BMRS.  An additional feature of Insights Solution is that it will re-run the calculations, the next working day which will consider further changes or later acceptances. There will still be variations but with the Insights Solution refreshing this data at D+1, it will be a more accurate calculation that is a lot closer to actual Settlement prices.

Q. Why can I not find data before 1 Feb 2023 for Indicative Imbalance Settlement?  
A. The calculations are now performed by the Settlement System and not initially available when we released the Settlement datasets in production in February 2024. We will be migrating the data and will make this available before we decommission legacy BMRS on 31 May 2024.

Q. What are Settlement messages?
A. Settlement Messages are generated internally by the SAA. They are a new feature to give customers information about the status and accuracy of Settlement calculations. For example, when performing a Settlement Run, if no Market Index Data has been received from a Market Index Data Provider effective on that day, the SAA will generate a system message.

Variations between old system and Insights Solution

Q. Why am I seeing more Output Usable file types?

A. The legacy datapush service outputs this data once a day. The Insights Solution will now deliver the data ‘as received’ which is on the hour. This relates to datasets NOU, FOU & UOU

Q. Why can I not find Total Bid Offer Data (TBOD)?
A. TBOD dataset is the summation of Bid Offer Data received and can be calculated outside of the Insights Solution.

Q. Why can I not find some European Transparency Regulation (ETR) data that is on the legacy BMRS?
A. Some datasets were not migrated from the BMRS to the Insights Solution. This follows implementation of CP1583 ‘Rationalising publication of European Transparency Regulation (ETR) data on Elexon Systems’.

• More information on CP1583

Insights Real-Time Information Service (IRIS)

Q. Can you have multiple queues for a single IRIS (Insights Solution Real Time Information Service) account?
A. No. Messages are transmitted once and if there are multiple queues it will only appear on one of them. You must have a single queue against a single account. There is no restriction on the number of unique accounts you can create.

Q. Can you tell me some more about the IRIS archive?
A. In response to user feedback, we have built the Insights Data Archive, a cloud blob storage service that hosts a carbon copy of every JSON message sent to IRIS users. The archive is publicly readable and updated in near-real-time as IRIS messages are published. You can access it using standard, out of the box software development tools.

From 15 February 2024, historic data, including Indicative Settlement Prices has been available on this archive, for as far back as the start of February 2024 only. There will be no archiving of Indicative Settlement Price data beyond this.  

• See the IRIS Archive Explainer on this GitHub page

The Insights Solution is part of the Elexon Kinnect Platform and is underpinned by cloud infrastructure which provides a number of endpoints for users to access the data.  

Users can ‘self-serve’ data requests  and all of the data we provide on the Insights Solution is open and available for anyone to access, modify and distribute. 

Video introducing the Insights Solution

This video explains how the Elexon Kinnect Insights Solution forms part of our digital platform providing state of the art data provision and APIs.

Background to the project objectives

The Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service (BMRS) served to provide industry parties with operational data relating to the GB Electricity Balancing and Settlement arrangements. It was used extensively by market participants, helping them make trading decisions and understanding market dynamics, acting as a prompt reporting platform as well as a means of accessing historic data.

Elexon introduced API data access in 2015 to access data. Since then, the number of users has increased considerably.  There were around 7 million daily requests to the BMRS API service in 2022/23, and the number of individual users has risen to around 90,000.

The former BMRS platform had difficulty delivering updates and it wasn’t able to to meet the needs of our customers for new data or functionality.  

More drawbacks of the former platform included:

• Difficulty in making changes which meant increasingly higher maintenance, licensing and support costs
• More costly and time consuming to make changes
• A decline in operational performance and an increase in the amount of time it took to fix the BMRS if there were unplanned outage or problem